Transgression

by R. S. Ingermanson

  “He’s gone in through the southern gates.” She grabbed Ari’s hand and pulled him toward the corner stairway. “Come on, we’re going up a different way, and then we’ll follow Dr. West.”

  Ari followed, but only because she was leading him by the hand.

  Crazy, crazy, crazy.

  * * *

  Rivka

  They had followed Dr. West for a quarter of an hour. “He’s not going anywhere until Paul comes, I’ll bet,” Rivka said. Dr. West had scouted all around the stairway leading up to the Antonia Fortress. He had taken up a position in the shade of the northern portico.

  “Let’s get out of here, then,” Ari said. “I don’t want him to spot us here. Right now, he thinks we’re about two thousand years away. We might as well keep him thinking that as long as possible.”

  Rivka shivered. How am I going to stop a nut with a gun? “Okay, let’s go back to the inner Temple. I want to keep an eye out for Paul.”

  “You’re not thinking of warning him, are you?”

  “No, it wouldn’t do any good,” Rivka said. “But if we stay near Paul, we can go along with the mob and have a reasonable chance of not being seen by Dr. West, right?”

  “I suppose so.” Ari’s voice sounded doubtful. They walked along in silence until they reached the foot of the stairs leading up to the inner Temple. “Rivka, are you really going to try to stop a bullet?”

  Rivka swallowed hard. “If I have to…yes.” Oh, God, I hope I don’t have to. Please, Father, help!

  “I cannot allow you to do that,” Ari said.

  Rivka stopped walking and stared at him. “Just what do you mean by that? I don’t recall you being appointed my legal guardian.”

  Ari’s face reddened. “I mean that I…have feelings for you. Strong feelings. It will be physically impossible for me to watch you take a bullet.”

  “Oh, great!” Rivka said. “Just listen up, Mr. Soldier in the Israel Defense Forces! I’m going to do what it takes to stop Dr. West. If that means getting hurt, then I’ll take my chances. I thought you had orders from your prime minister? Or doesn’t that matter when you’re infatuated?” Furious, she spun on her heel and marched up the steps. If Ari wasn’t going to help, then why had he even bothered to come along?

  She heard Ari’s footsteps behind her. “Rivka, please!”

  Ignore him. Rivka kept going. It was one thing that Ari had a crush on her. But it was another thing to let him mess up all of history.

  “Rivka!”

  This argument would rip her apart if she let it. Everything within her told her to leave Dr. West alone. She could stop one bullet, but she couldn’t stop more. Obviously, God had some plan. The sensible thing would be to sit back with Ari and watch this movie play out. But what if God had chosen her to play the lead? Maybe Ari was the leading man—wouldn’t that be nice? Or maybe he was the bad guy. God hadn’t given her the script. But he had given her a gut instinct, and that told her to fight. Fight Damien. Fight Ari.

  Right now.

  She reached the top of the stairs, went in through the massive iron gate, and suddenly broke into a run.

  “Rivka, stop!”

  The thin mid-morning crowd didn’t slow her much. Rivka sprinted through the people dotting the Court of Women. All she could think of was ditching Ari. The court was huge—you could play soccer in here. By the time she reached the other side, Rivka was out of breath. Where was Ari? At the south gate, she stopped to look back. Ari had stopped thirty yards behind her, and was now helping an old man to his feet and apologizing. He turned to look at Rivka.

  She spun around and ran blindly.

  And slammed into someone.

  Together they staggered down several steps. Then a strong pair of hands gripped her arms. “Zonah!”

  Rivka looked up into the angry black eyes of a young Temple guard. An absurd thought flashed through her mind.

  Go to jail. Go directly to jail. Do not stop Dr. West. Do not collect two hundred dollars.

  Chapter 24

  Ari

  ONE MINUTE, RIVKA HAD BEEN in sight. The next minute, she was gone. Ari felt panic stabbing him in the gut. He dashed toward the south gate. Where was Rivka?

  When he reached the gate, he stopped short.

  Several steps below, a young Temple guard held Rivka at arm’s length, a look of distaste scrawled across his face.

  Rivka said something to the guard and then kicked at his shins.

  In response, the young man shook her hard and said something that sounded like zonah. Which meant she was in big trouble.

  Ari had no time to think. He marched down the steps and jabbed his finger at the guard’s face. “You will take your hands off my wife at once,” he said in his best biblical Hebrew.

  A look of enormous surprise washed across the young guard’s face. “You are a scholar, Adoni?” he said in excellent Hebrew.

  “Yes, of course,” Ari said. It was true and it was not, depending on how you defined a scholar. Right now, he wanted only to get Rivka out of this thug’s claws.

  “And how do I know she is your wife?” said the guard.

  “Very simple,” Ari said. He turned to Rivka and whispered in English, “Kiss me.” He leaned toward her.

  She spat in his face and hissed something in Aramaic.

  How dare she? Ari felt like turning around right then and walking away. Instead he wiped the spit off his face and smeared it on her tunic.

  The guard laughed harshly. “Very well, my scholar. She is obviously your wife. Take her home and beat her well.” He shoved her into Ari’s arms.

  Ari stared at him stupidly. What was going on?

  “Get me out of here,” Rivka whispered in English.

  Ari seized her arm and yanked her away. Together they marched down the stairs toward the outer court. When they reached the lower level, he said, “What happened back there?”

  “Were you trying to get me stoned?” Rivka asked. “In this culture, a wife never kisses her husband in public. The only woman who would do such a thing is a zonah.”

  “Oh.” Ari suddenly felt light-headed.

  “You could have got me killed,” Rivka said. “You would have got off with only a warning, of course.”

  “Forgive me,” Ari said. “I was only trying to help.”

  “If you really want to help, you’ll let go of my arm so I can do my job,” Rivka said.

  “And your job is…?”

  “The same as yours!” Rivka said. “Stop Dr. West.”

  Ari released his grip on her arm. “At any cost?”

  “Yes, of course.” Rivka rubbed her upper arm. “Ouch, that hurts.”

  “It is nothing compared to a bullet.”

  “Listen, Ari, there’s one thing you should know about me.” Rivka put both hands on her hips and tilted her chin up at him. “I never give up. When I decide to do something, I just go do it. And I’ve decided to stop Dr. West.”

  “And how do you know you will succeed?”

  She smiled at him, and he felt his heart do a double back flip. “Simple. You told me I’ll win.”

  “I told you?” Ari laughed out loud. “Perhaps we should not speak English anymore, my friend. Evidently, I do not express myself well in that language, if you are so misguided—”

  “Just follow through on your own logic, Mr. Hotshot Physicist,” Rivka said. “You already told me that two thousand years before our own century, three time travelers arrived in Jerusalem. One, Dr. Damien West, came on a mission to kill Paul of Tarsus with a gun. And you claim that Dr. West failed. Some nonsense about a single-valued trajectory of the universe, right?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Let me finish,” Rivka said. “How could he possibly fail, Ari? He has surprise on his side, and a weapon against which Paul has no defense. How did he fail?”

  “Something…happened,” Ari said. “How should I know?”

  “Exactly,” she said. “Rivka Meyers happened, that’s what. Rivka stopped him. D
on’t ask me how, but she did it.”

  “You are forgetting one thing, my lovely logician,” Ari said. He liked her spunk, her tenacity, her willingness to fight for what she thought right. He just didn’t like where she was going with this particular fight.

  She simply looked at him as if he had said nothing.

  “It is possible that we have not traveled back into the past of our own universe,” Ari said. “It is mathematically possible that we have transferred to a parallel universe—one in which Paul of Tarsus is assassinated by a man with a gun.”

  Something seemed to deflate in Rivka. Her shoulders sagged, and the fire went out of her eyes. “In that case…is our own universe safe?”

  “Oh yes,” Ari said. “Quite safe. It is you who is not safe—in either scenario.”

  “And how do we know which universe we’re in?” Rivka asked.

  Ari shrugged. “We do not—yet. We can perform a little experiment to find out.”

  “And that would be…?”

  “We watch Damien,” Ari said. “If he kills Paul, then we are not in our own universe, but some other.”

  “And if he fails?”

  “Then we do not know,” Ari said. “We can only know if we see events diverging from the actual history of our own universe.”

  Rivka’s black eyes closed for a long moment. Then she opened them. “Fine then, Ari. Take a seat and do your little experiment. If you think this is like some computer simulation where nobody really gets hurt, then you’re wrong. This is reality, even if it’s somebody else’s reality.”

  “And what makes you so sure you’re the one to stop Damien?”

  “Because I’m here. Because I know his plan. Because I want more than anything to stop him.” She smiled serenely up at Ari. “I’ve figured it out. I’m God’s avatar.”

  “So God controls everything you do, like a puppet?”

  “No, I still have free will. God tells me what to do, and I can choose whether to obey or not. Right now, he’s telling me to go stop Dr. West, whatever it takes.”

  Whatever it takes. Ari had to admit that one of the reasons he liked Rivka was her gung ho spirit, her willingness to just go do whatever she had set her heart to do. But the idea of her stopping bullets terrified him. “Aren’t you afraid of dying, Rivka?”

  She pushed past him and began walking along the perimeter of the dividing wall that marked the area forbidden to goyim.

  “Of course I am,” she said. “I don’t enjoy pain, Ari. Nobody does. But I’m not afraid of being dead.”

  Ari trotted after her. “Neither am I,” he said. “I’m afraid of being alive if you’re dead.”

  “How romantic,” Rivka said.

  “Don’t be sarcastic,” Ari said. “I don’t want anything to happen to you.”

  “I’m flattered,” she said. “Really, Ari, I am. And not only that, I like you. Did I tell you that yet? You’re the most interesting guy I’ve ever met, although we have a serious difference of opinion on religion. That’s a problem. But I have a job to do right now. So please, if you’re not going to help me, just don’t get in my way, okay?”

  Ari didn’t say anything. They rounded the corner, and the whole northern half of the outer court came into view. Rivka hadn’t said she wouldn’t have him. She had said they had a difference of opinion. A woman could change her mind about religious differences. All he had to do was—

  “Okay, Ari? Promise me you won’t get in my way?”

  Ari was about to answer when he heard a shout above them, in the inner Temple. A loud shout. His head spun around. “What did they say?”

  “Men of Yisrael, come to our aid!” Rivka said in Hebrew. “Ari, it’s starting!”

  “What’s starting?”

  Rivka grabbed his hand and tugged. “Come on, we’re in the way. There’s going to be a riot, and we need to get ready for it.”

  “Ready? How do we get ready for a—”

  She pulled him toward the west. “In a minute, there’s going to be a mob standing right here. I want that mob between us and Dr. West.”

  Ari followed her. What was he supposed to do?

  The noise above them grew louder. A minute later, several young men dashed out of the gate and down the broad expanse of steps into the outer court. “Find some stones!” one of them shouted.

  “Bring out the lawbreaker!”

  A knot of men appeared at the gate, arms thrashing at someone, feet kicking. Ari tensed. He hated to see violence. The memory of Dov struggling underwater in the hands of the Arabs flashed through his brain. He started forward.

  Rivka caught his sleeve. “Don’t interfere,” she said. “The cavalry is on the way.”

  * * *

  Damien

  Damien had been preparing for this moment for the last two years, and still it caught him by surprise. One minute, the vast outer court of the Temple hummed with peaceful activity—men standing in clusters gossiping, scholars and students arguing under the shade of the giant open-air porticoes.

  And now, from nowhere, a riot had come spilling out of the inner Temple and down into the outer court.

  He had not expected so many people. Where was Paul in all that mess?

  Shouts suddenly issued from the portico roof above Damien. Latin. He relaxed. The Romans were coming, right on schedule. The clatter of iron-soled boots on wood rang out overhead. A dozen soldiers dashed down the stairway from the portico roof and into the outer court.

  Damien remembered a Campus Crusader who had once given him a pamphlet with a title something like You Can Trust the Bible. Sure enough, this little story was playing out just like it said in the Bible. Too bad for Paul. Damien held his place and waited.

  Now the soldiers had covered half the distance to the still-escalating riot. Damien raised his binoculars. This would be interesting. A handful of Roman soldiers against a mob. How were they going to handle this?

  They handled it like Los Angeles cops.

  Forming into a wedge, they rammed through the crowd with shields forward. The people trampled each other to get out of the way. An old man, clipped by a shield, actually got airborne. In less than a minute, the Romans arrived at the mob scene, a couple of hundred yards from where Damien watched.

  He studied the Romans. Each of them had a short, broad sword of iron. At the sight of the naked blades, the mob calmed down in a hurry.

  If these Jews were cowed by mere swords, wait till they saw what a gun could do.

  The soldiers formed into a circle. Presumably, Paul was in the center, but Damien couldn’t see him. According to the historians, Paul was supposed to be short. But no worry. In five minutes, he would be standing still at the top of the stairs, waiting to catch some lead.

  Damien lowered his binoculars.

  Uh, oh.

  He remembered reading in the Bible that the crowd would be large and noisy. He just hadn’t expected it to look like hooligans at an English soccer match.

  Damien watched while the mob spilled around the circle of Romans on all sides, a swarming human anthill. The noise beat on Damien’s ears. The violence had resumed, worse than before. It would be impossible to aim a gun while in the middle of all that.

  Damien fought panic. Stay calm. According to the Bible, things would settle down and Paul would give a speech. For the first time in many years, Damien hoped something in that book was true.

  The red-feathered helmets of the soldiers stood out above the crowd, marking ground zero. For several minutes, Damien watched them come closer. Time to join the party. Now.

  He moved forward and muscled his way into the mob. The only thing that could go wrong would be to drop his gun. He kept it buried in his left armpit, smothered in his strong right hand.

  The Romans began ascending the staircase. The noise grew louder—a physical pain in Damien’s ears. When the soldiers reached the top of the steps, they stopped. An officer stepped forward and entered the circle.

  Damien held his breath. Would he really get a cha
nce for a shot? He stood only about fifty yards away from the soldiers, close enough to make a guaranteed kill in a shooting range. But this wasn’t a shooting range. This wild, roiling crowd made him feel like a cork in a blender. And even if these fools settled down, he would never find room to extend his arm to take aim.

  Suddenly, the circle of soldiers broke open and two men stepped forward: the Roman officer and a small man with one of those Jewish prayer shawls over his head. Paul of Tarsus.

  Damien couldn’t even see his eyes, but that didn’t matter. Pumping a couple of hollow-point bullets into his chest would do the trick.

  The Roman held up his hand, and then pointed to Paul.

  Magically, the crowd began to quiet. Not all at once, but much faster than an English soccer crowd would have. Or an American one. Obviously, primitive cultures lacking microphones had to behave differently, or their public speakers wouldn’t be audible.

  Paul made a gesture with his right arm, and this seemed to quiet things down even more. Damien was astounded. Within half a minute, the mob turned into a bunch of pussycats. It was still densely packed, and Damien had no way on earth to get his gun up to aim.

  But he saw an obvious solution to that problem. Get to the front of the crowd. That would put him within fifteen or twenty yards of the target. At that range, it would take half a second to raise his arm, aim, and double-tap a couple of rounds.

  Piece of cake.

  On the steps above the crowd, Paul began speaking. Damien looked at his watch. If he remembered right, Paul was going to give quite a little monologue here—at least ten minutes.

  Damien chose a spot with his eyes at the base of the steps, less than forty yards away. Could he cover that distance in ten minutes?

  No problem.

  He twisted his shoulder in between the two men in front of him and pushed.

  * * *

  Rivka

  Rivka massaged her left arm above the elbow. Someone had slugged her there before things had settled down. “Ari, do you see anything?”