FOR MY SINS I have been married about two hundred times and to some very nice women. With others, it didn't turn out so good. But believe me eternal life hasn't been as hard as a lot of writers like to pretend. Generally, I'd say the first four or five centuries are the worst, because you keep expecting things to change and of course they don't. You have to appreciate the pleasures of repetition. I mean, if we didn't enjoy repetition, we wouldn't like music, would we? Living forever has certain advantages, but you have to get into the right rhythm. So yes it was the first few hundred years which were hardest, when I made the mistake of falling in love and then let boredom get the better of me.

After some two thousand years, you might suspect I'd seen it all, but you never have seen it all, believe me. After a while, you start appreciating the details. The little differences. Sometimes the big differences, too. Plumbing, for instance, and rapid transport. As we went into the renaissance, the enlightenment, the industrial revolution, things really did improve. What's more, women became prettier and smarter. Don't get me wrong, there were always smart women, but gradually large numbers of them became confident. This meant a steady overall improvement in relationships for me. My present wife is a theoretical physicist and her favourite feminist is Andrea Dworkin. She's read Proust four times in French and a couple of times in English. She knows all about my situation and is fascinated by it. It's a happy marriage. No children. I stopped having them a while ago, as soon as it became safe. In fact, if it wasn't for my unforgettable desire for one particular woman, things would be perfect now.

Yes, that is a problem. I've been in love with the same person for about fifteen hundred years and it never gets any better, but I'll tell you about that when the time comes. Would I have liked to have seen more of the world? Probably. But it's not my reason for wanting to travel. That, too, I'll tell you about. For now, let's just say I'm settled, if not totally content.

Not that I always feel so reconciled. I'm not as rich as you'd think I could be. I've lost as many fortunes as I've made. I've had my feckless moments, that I'm not particularly proud of. Luckily, because I was rarely of an Orthodox disposition, I also had plenty of guiltless fun. When you're being punished for eternity under the weight of a serious (and basically unjust) curse laid on you, you've already paid a high price, so what's to feel guilty? To say I've paid my debt to Jesus is to put it mildly. Not that it was actually Jesus who laid the curse on me in the first place. I hold no grudges, believe me. God was just paying back a debt to this guy, Joseph of Arimathea, who turned up in the settlement of Londinium with his spear and his cup and his followers. Admittedly, I could have been nicer to him, but frankly I found his claims a bit thin.

In those days the Romans were in charge of Britain as well as Palestine where I'd been born. You might not know much, but you'll have heard of the Roman Empire and doubtless, since you're actually able to read, you have a rough idea of the dates. By then I'd settled in the far West, near what's modern Tunis, and was a Carthaginian trader, practising my calling with reasonable success. I was planning a Mediterranean winter at home on the profits of our voyage, when this boat came beating up the Thames, striped sail swelling in the rainy wind, and deposited a bunch of sorry-looking men and women east of the wooden bridge, where most travellers came ashore. They clearly weren't used to the weather.

I was holding the fort, finishing off some business and waiting for my own ship to return from a side trip to Market Zion, Cornwall, to offload some woad and pick up some tin. Although the Romans were already building a city to rival the Empire's capital, with a huge forum, temples, law courts and villas, that bridge over to Southwark, along with a growing system of straight roads, they didn't really get down to the western end of the island much and were perfectly agreeable to us doing what trading we could with our traditional contacts, mostly hard-working tin-miners who wanted our various dyes and cotton, especially since we always gave them a decent deal on the tin.

When Joseph and his entourage came ashore on what in those days was already a very presentable wharf they looked as if they'd had a rough time of it. They were clearly from the same part of the world as me. They wore some nice quality robes--tight weaving, well co-ordinated colours, wool or cotton or a mixture of both. Gold bracelets and chains, rings with precious stones, nice silver circlets holding their hoods on. Their travelling chests also showed that they weren't peasants. Solid cedar, big brass fittings, names on the sides in Hebrew. Worth a bit, as I said to Joseph, recommending the safest inn. He'd heard that the settlement was as crime free as far as anywhere on the island was crime free at that time. Big Roman presence. They were a thieving, sweet-talking lot those Brits, and weren't above murdering you in your bed if they could get away with it. London was a new town then, based on a place called Lud's Dun, after one of their gods supposed to inhabit the hill above the river. Not much of a hill, really. But the Roman engineers had fortified it, given it some pretty good amenities and settled a bunch of their legionnaires there. It wasn't bad farming land, thanks to the Thames's tendency to flood. It would be a while before anyone started building serious artificial banks to improve the navigation and save the somewhat vulnerable real estate as it improved in value.

"You're a long way from home," I said, once I'd established they spoke Hebrew, "what brings you to this Godforsaken neck of the woods?"

"We're on a mission," confided the woman who introduced herself as the bearded oldster's wife (she couldn't have been more than twenty-five). "We're from Jerusalem. You know, where He was crucified and rose from the dead."

Nutters, I thought. Not many people now know that in Europe and North Africa Britain was considered to be the America of its day. The Far West, the frontier of the Empire, where you were free to make something of yourself. Anyone who'd been persecuted for their religion (and frankly there were a lot fewer persecutions at that time, the Romans being by and large a practical lot, as are most pantheists) tended to set off for Albion with plans to found a colony. The Romans had trouble getting anyone else to settle there and it was part of their usual method to encourage trade and industry wherever they could. You needed people to secure an Empire. Of course, there was the usual official Temple of the Imperial Cult and a temple to Diana on part of Ludgate Hill, but other religions were encouraged, because every able-bodied man could be called up for the army, if necessary. They needed people to help build roads. People to tax. The native Britons by and large weren't strong on that sort of forward-looking work, still being excited about farming, especially growing corn, which they were pretty good at. It hadn't taken most of them long to see the advantages of accepting the Romans, though I understood there were still a few tribes up north who were more warlike and regarded us Mediterranean types as interlopers, but this was more to do with propaganda being fed them by their rulers. Once they saw the reality, they tended to come in out of the cold and their rulers had no choice but to comply, if they wanted to have people they could still rule, at least nominally.

I understood a corn king myth when I heard it, even though I wasn't used to one being attached to the Greek and Jewish derived beliefs then prevalent in Palestine. So I accepted that the wrapped vessel Joseph carried was seed and that he would use his ceremonial hoe (the long thing all bound up in red cloth) to plant the first year's barley or whatever it was and get his little group started. There was plenty of room in those days, especially over near the East Coast where few local tribes had established towns on account of the awful climate. But Joseph of Arimathea, as it turned out, was more interested in heading west. I advised him to keep the ship handy and wait until my friends got back, since they would be returning up the coast any day now. He seemed grateful for my recommendation and suggested that on the following Saturday (his Sabbath) I join them in prayer and so forth, but I politely told him that Moloch, with all his faults, was good enough for me, along with the variety of household gods I carried in my purse or had stuck up on a little shelf in my digs, only a short distance from the inn. I wasn't deeply religious, still aren't, but, in common with most of the people I knew and did business with, thought it best to stay on the safe side. Joseph, however, was distinctly dependent, one of those old-fashioned Jews you still ran across in Palestine where religion was enjoying a revival, as so frequently happens amongst conquered peoples who can't raise much in the way of an army. I've seen it happen a thousand times. He started preaching at me, in the way they do, and I nodded and smiled and said I'd think about it but that Saturday was my busiest period, when all the Brits came in from the outlying farms to sell their cereals and livestock.

And that would have been it if Jessie, the afore-mentioned young wife, hadn't taken a fancy to me and asked me out of Joseph's hearing if there was a chance I might change my mind, in which case where would she be able to find me.

I don't know if you're familiar with the appearance of the average lantern-jawed British lady of the period, but let's just say they weren't my type whereas Jessie, all dark, smouldering eyes and black curly hair, was. I told her where I was staying. A house we had built, because we came and went so frequently, which was looked after by a displaced German, an ex-legionnaire and a reliable bloke whom we paid well. You could see it from the inn, because it was built above the flood zone, had two substantial storeys and a tiled roof of the Roman type. A lot of people actually thought it was a Roman's house and we were pretty proud of it, though it had no central heating and could get horribly smoky in winter, it didn't smell much since the privy was served by a pipe going directly into a small river they called the Flid and would become, of course, the Fleet.

I wasn't surprised, after I'd been in bed for about half-an-hour and the German was snoring his head off downstairs, to hear a tap on the door. Against my better instincts I threw on an old bit of toga and padded down to inch it open. It was her, sure enough. I checked what I could of the outside and let her in. "I've left him," she said. "I'm sick and tired of his raving on about this bloody cup and this bloody spear." She had brought them with her. I hadn't expected an actual runaway, just a quick roll on my palliasse until dawn, when I thought they'd be back on their boat and heading for Cornwall and Market Zion.

"No, love," I said. "I'm not helping you pinch his worldly goods, especially since he means to start a farm with them. We have Roman law here. I know what value these farmers place on that stuff."

"He's not a farmer," she said. "He's barmy. He's a Jesusite. He's brought a bit of the cross as well, but I couldn't see much use for that. He's awaiting what he calls the Rapture, due a hundred years after his prophet's death, and he wants to found a religious colony so he can be ready for the prophet when he turns up again. He married me under completely false pretences shortly after he left Arimathea. Described himself as a wine merchant. All for my dowry. He was on his uppers. Honest, I'm not loose. I just want to get back home to Palestine. I'm not totally sure he doesn't plan to kill me. Human sacrifices and so on. Some of those loonies have already crucified themselves in what they call 'Imitation of the Kristos'. I can see you're surprised, but, yes, they're Greeks, or as good as."

"Greeks are generally so rational!" I was shocked. Then I shrugged. "Well, he'll get on all right in Cornwall if he plans a few human sacrifices. They all do it down there, especially when the harvest's been poor. So what's this, some sort of Sun god?"

"He's a Jesusite, I told you."