Another Sample Chapter of The Sign of the Dolphin

Here is another chapter from Peter Rodgers’s upcoming release The Sign of the Dolphin!

Not the official cover. Official cover to be revealed soon!

23

A villa near Noviomagus Reginorum

Marcus to Justin, Greetings in Christ Jesus, the light of the world.

We have arrived at the villa of Lucius near Noviomagus. Our voyage across the sea was pleasant, for the storms had passed, and the air was clear and crisp with a light breeze from the southwest. Not long after we bid a tearful farewell to Irenaeus, and set sail, we began to see the coast of Britain. First it was a mirage, then a dot, and then several dots on the horizon. Then the dots joined together and became a green mass before us, rising above the blue, inviting, forbidding. I prayed for this land and its people as we sailed into the harbor at sunset. I asked God for wisdom, and the right words, as we docked alongside the villa, whose large, imposing outline loomed in the twilight.

We waited on the deck while Justus went to find Lucius, to whom he had sold pots and bowls for years. He returned after some time to report that Lucius was not to be found. He had gone with most of his family to Virulamium on official business, and there was no telling when he would return. The steward of the house offered us hospitality, and the cook found us something to eat. Though it was a simple meal, the cook grumbled at the lateness of the hour.

This place is very quiet, almost deserted, except for a few servants and family members who did not travel with the king. The sheer size of the villa, with over 100 rooms, makes it seem all the more empty. With the king not here, and neither a word from Marius nor a letter from you, I feel very out of touch. So we must simply wait in this place until the king returns. Irenaeus gave me the names of a few Christians known to him in this island kingdom, and Justus knows many folk here, but I must wait to speak with the king before I do anything else.

The steward, who seems to be very straightforward and efficient, simply showed us to our rooms and left us to ourselves.

“We’ll try to look after you until the king returns,” he said.

“And when do you expect him to return?” I asked.

He shrugs, “Anybody’s guess. When the king goes off on his business he can be away for some time, and when he takes his family, that slows him down even more. If he returns by way of Venta, where he has another villa, he will be away longer still, for his wife has a friend there, and they get to talking. But he must be back next week, for an important task awaits him in the city.”

I whispered to myself, “And here at the villa.”

I fell into a deep sleep, but was awakened before dawn by the sound of someone crying. A woman was pouring her heart out. I could not make out the details, but she seemed to be mourning the loss of a loved-one. “Gone, gone!” she cried again and again. The crying faded after a while, as if she had cried herself to sleep. But I was wide awake, and the first shafts of morning light heralded the new day. I dressed and set forth to explore this almost deserted place. Walking into the atrium, I noticed that all the doors around it were shut except for one at the far end. I headed for it, hoping that it would lead to the garden. But I stopped in the center, captivated by the most remarkable picture on the tessellated floor. Around the edge were sea creatures of various sorts. Wine vases and scallop shells flanked sea horses and sea panthers. At the outer border there was a spiral of vine tendrils springing from the handles of wine vases. A small black bird, an ibis, sat on one of these tendrils. It must be the trademark of the artist who designed this mosaic. But the central figure was truly remarkable. It was a picture of a cupid riding on a dolphin. The figure was brownish-red, with bits of Samian ware used for the red. The dolphin was fan-tailed and seemed almost alive. The cupid held a trident in his hand. The picture was clearly the central focus of the room, and perhaps of the whole house. Perhaps a reference to this splendid floor was the place to begin in speaking about Jesus Christ to the inquiring king. I remembered Irenaeus and Diognetus talking about St. Paul and the philosophers at Athens. “Begin where they are,” was their counsel. So all I had to do was to await the return of the king.

I moved toward the open door in the approaching daylight, looking back once, even twice to see the gamboling pair on the floor. Now a shaft of sunlight shone through the clerstory, and hit the dolphin and rider, causing the tiles and stones to sparkle. The dolphin and the cupid were alive, and the sea serpents seemed almost to leap off the floor.

Once at the open door I looked in. The room was lined with shelves on which were stored rolls and codices. Books and papers lay on a table in the center. I stepped into the room, now illuminated by the rising sun. This was clearly the villa library, a room of greater size than I would have imagined in a villa in a remote province. The urge to look at the books was irresistible. Before I knew it I was standing in front of the table reading a fine roll of Homer’s Odyssey, and next to it Seneca’s proverbs. In a bucket beside the table were Discorides’ treatise On Plants and Tacitus’ History. I moved over to the shelves, where the neatly stacked rolls were each labeled with a tag. Running my eyes along I noticed a wealth of Homer and Euribides. Several copies of Virgil’s Aeneid were stowed together. What a feast! How I wish that you were here to share my discovery. I hope that we might remain here long enough for me to fully enjoy this treasure trove. I reached for a roll of Homer’s Iliad. Just then I sensed a shadow fall across the growing light from the doorway.

“Who are you, and what are you doing in my library?” came a low and stern voice. There in the doorway was a little old man, almost as wide as he was tall, with gray hair round his ears and no hair on top. His eyes were flashing with anger.

In my surprise I nearly dropped the roll of Homer. I stood frozen and speechless.

“I demand to know who you are, and why you are meddling with my books…or rather, the king’s books, I should say.”

“I am a guest of the king,” I stammered. “I have come on his invitation, and I was surprised not to find him here.”

“So then,” the little fat man continued, ”You decide to meddle in his library, and poke around in places where you do not belong!”

“The door was open,” I protested, “and I did not know that the library was off limits to visitors.”

“Well it is, unless you have both the king’s permission and my approval. Now be off!”

The librarian was standing in the doorway, and I could not possibly exit at once as he had commanded. So I replied as apologetically and meekly as I could, “As you wish, but I am disappointed, since this is the finest villa library I have ever seen.”

“Do you think so?” he replied, softening his tone, but then he added more sharply, “And what do you know about libraries?”

“I’ve seen a few,” I replied, “especially on my recent journey through Gaul, and I’ve seen the great libraries of Rome and Alexandria, but for a villa, this one is remarkable.”

“Really,” the librarian continued in a friendlier voice, “we do think it’s rather fine, and I worked for years to collect these books. And so did my predecessor, who first came here in the days of the great King Cogidubnus. Before that wise old scholar died, he said to me, then just a lad of twenty, ‘Castor – that’s my name – Castor I want you to be librarian in my place.’ That was nearly fifty years ago, in the days when they could afford to keep a librarian. Today I have to combine this job with others like keeping track of the estate accounts. But I have never stopped collecting, shelving and arranging books, and guarding this room against visitors who might want to steal them.” He eyed me with mild suspicion.

“Perhaps some visitors would steal them,” I said, taking a step toward the door to comply with his first request, “perhaps some, but not I, nor any of the current visitors.”

Did my voice hesitate? I remembered the incident at the villa of Marius, when the Revelation was stolen from the library. But it was returned. So it wasn’t really stolen, but only borrowed. And there was no sign that it had been altered.

“Right,” I added, “I will go as you asked.”

“No,” Castor insisted, still blocking the doorway with his great girth. “No, stay and tell me about the libraries you have seen. Have you really seen the one in Alexandria?”

“Yes, indeed, about four years ago.” I gave a long description of that greatest of libraries, and of all the wonderful books I had seen there.

“And let me show you my books…the king’s books, I mean.”

I objected that I did not yet have the king’s permission.

“King Lucius won’t care,” Castor replied as he moved out of the doorway and toward the table. “He hasn’t used them much in the last year.”

The morning sun now illuminated the library, and the old man opened treasure after treasure, assured that I was there to respect, learn and enjoy, and not to steal or deface. He pulled a newer scroll from the shelf and said,

“Do you see this copy of Aelius Aristides, Sacred Discourses?” Castor unrolled the vellum on which the ink seemed only just dry. “I had to go all the way to Rome to find this book for the king.”

Castor then told me the most revealing tale. The king had fallen sick about two years ago with some terrible ailment. He could hardly eat or drink and spent much time in bed. He called in the local medicine men, and they tried their cures and their spells, but they didn’t work, though he spent a great sum of money on them. So he threw them out, and decided to manage his own care. He bought books on health and healing. He read widely in Galen. Castor pointed to a whole shelf of Galen’s books. The king even sent Castor to Rome for a copy of Aristides, for he was impressed with the story of how that sickly orator had been cured by his devotion to Asclepius. Through revelations and dreams Aristides had found healing. But the king had no dreams and no revelations, and he was not healed, and the books were shelved. Lucius went off to Aqua Sulis, the famous healing baths in the west near the wild borders, but he came back no better, only worse.

Then about six months ago, when the king was close to dispair, a wise old man came through Noviomagus. He was a trader in metals, and he claimed to have healing powers in the name of Jesus. The king had learned of him through a young soldier. The old man prayed over the king and the ailment was soon gone. So Lucius tried to find out more about Jesus, but the merchant had gone, and the soldier could not tell him much. But he did urge the king to send to Rome, for a man named Eleutherus, who would be able to tell him about the healing name.

I told Castor who I was, that I had been sent from Rome by Eleutherus, the leader of the Christians there, to bring the news of Jesus to the king and to his kingdom. I told him that Eleutherus had set out to bring the news of Jesus himself, but that he was called back to Rome on an urgent matter. He had commissioned me to go in his place as his spokesman and representative.

I then asked the astonished Castor whether he had any Christian books in the library. He said that he did not. There was a copy of the Jewish scriptures, or a portion of them, a roll of the prophets. There was also a recent book by Celsus, but he was bitterly opposed to the Christian movement. Then he stopped and thought for a moment.

He pointed to a pile of books in the corner that had never been sorted out. He said, “There may be a Christian book or two in that old unsorted pile in the corner. It has sat there all the time I’ve been librarian, but I’ve never even looked at it. The old librarian told me they had come from the eatate of Claudia and Pudens, a Christian couple from Noviomagus. There are some old letters and a few books there, but as I say, I’ve never looked at them, except to notice a tag with the label Luke and another Paul. You know how much a librarian has to do, and how libraries tend to collect junk.”

So I took a bold step. I said, “I would be glad to look at them, and help you sort them out.”

“And steal them, I shouldn’t wonder,” he said, but I could tell that he was playful and not serious.

I objected that if I had come as an emissary of the God who commanded, Thou shalt not steal, would I be commending that God to the king by stealing his books?

“There are different ways of stealing.” Castor replied.

As he moved to the corner to find the pile of books and letters, a bell rang and Castor said, “There’s the bell for breakfast, and nothing keeps me from my breakfast. So I must lock the library, and I had better not find you snooping around my books…I mean the king’s books.”

So I am determined to see these books. But I’d better choose my times wisely, since I suspect that nothing will keep Castor from lunch or dinner, or meals in between.

Greet all in Rome, especially Eleutherus and Apollonius.

Peter Rodgers was Rector of St. John’s Episcopal Church, New Haven Connecticut, and an Associate Fellow of Timothy Dwight College at Yale University from 1979 until 2003. He holds degrees from Hobart College, General Theological Seminary and Oxford University. Before coming to St. John’s in 1979 he was curate for student ministry at the Round Church in Cambridge, England. He has published several journal articles on the text of the New Testament and is the author of Knowing Jesus (InterVarsity 1982, Forward Movement 1989), and Text and Story (Wipf and Stock, 2011). In his retirement, he teaches New Testament at Fuller Theological Seminary, Sacramento campus, and is Pastor of St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church, Antelope, CA.