A centurion, replete in battle regalia stopped behind the chair, rested a hand on Romanis’ shoulder, then came and knelt in front of him.
‘Can you speak?’ he said.
Romanis blinked tears from his eyes.
‘Father, I have failed you,’ he said.
Hector gazed lovingly at his son. The ravages of war had ill prepared him for the distressed state of his own flesh and blood. Hector held the stumps of Romanis’ arms in his calloused hands.
‘Father, I wish to die for I am a burden to all,’ Romanis said.
‘I will not hear of it. You remain a soldier. I am as proud today as on the day of your induction into the royal legion. You will be well cared for and instructed in battle strategy to assist the advisory in times of war.’
Hector spoke out of fear and hope for his son’s life. In truth, Romanis was near death. The lightning strike and savage amputations had strained his body to the point of collapse.
‘Herod is dead,’ Hector said, ‘murdered by Shorkaror who was seen leaving the palace in a vicious mood.’
‘I did hear, father, but have you word of Jeremiah? I have not seen him in three months.’
‘Jeremiah spent an afternoon with your mother and met with Herod later in the day. I believe he has returned to the slave camp.’
‘Who will govern Tiberius now Herod is dead?’ Romanis said.
‘There is great turmoil in the royal court. Herodias is adamant she should inherit control. She arrived in Tiberius yesterday morning from a pleasure cruise along the north shore of the great sea. As you well know, my son, Herodias could not discern the rear end of a hippopotamus from its head. She will need dissuading if the city is to prosper.’
A rare smile crossed Romanis’ face.
‘How long will you stay in Tiberius, father?’
‘For three days after Herod is buried. Then I will meet with other generals in Jerusalem to consult with Caesar.’
‘I ask one last favour, father.’
Romanis pointed a stump at the clay jar against the wall.
‘In the jar is the sword you gifted me. Give it to Jeremiah when next you see him.’
Hector pulled the sword from the jar and the hilt sparkled. He hooked it on his belt and kissed Romanis on both cheeks.
‘I will return in spring, dear son, and together we will help plan the future of the empire.’
‘I await your return, father.’
But Hector knew the reality of it all.
He left and spoke softly to the servant girl in the infirmary, handing her a tiny pouch of seeds. He saw neither of his sons again.
Hector rode into Jerusalem near the end of Passover, entering the mighty palace of Herod the Great, the centre of Roman governance. Situated in the upper-west portion of the city it comprised a majestic fortified construction with elaborate accommodation, extensive baths and banquet halls. Its porch-lined courtyards were surrounded by trees and dotted with ponds and bronze statues.
An agitated crowd fled the palace grounds, jeering loudly as it spilled onto the streets. Men and women were at fever-pitch calling for the release of a bandit named Barabbas, to spare him from crucifixion, in exchange for a holy man from Nazareth. Hector rode around them, crossed the courtyard and dismounted. A young soldier approached him, offering to lead his stallion to the stables. Hector welcomed his nephew, Daniel.
‘Great to see you, young man,’ Hector said, slapping him encouragingly on the back. ‘How is your training progressing?’
‘I graduate next week to be dispatched with a legion of soldiers into southern Egypt. Our spies report the Meroin King amassing a vast army near the fifth cataract of the Nile. Thebes is in danger of a major offensive,’ Daniel said.
‘Then you will need this.’ He unhooked the bronze sword from his belt. ‘Put out your hands.’
He laid it across Daniel’s upturned palms.
‘This is too great a prize for me.’
‘Nonsense, this sword belongs to your cousin Romanis. He insisted I give it to you. An accident during the festival games will prevent his return to the battlefield. Guard it well.’
Captivated, Daniel turned it over in his hands, the blade shimmering in the sun.
‘What is the extent of Romanis’ injuries, uncle?’
‘He has some paralysis in his legs,’ Hector said.
‘I wish him a speedy recovery.’
Daniel bowed to Hector who ruffled his hair affectionately.
‘Off with you then. This horse needs watering. Good luck in Egypt.’
With a spring in his step, Daniel led the stallion to the stables as Hector ascended the stairs of the great meeting hall.
12
Daniel admired the bronze sword he’d attached to his belt. It matched the armoured breast plates and metal leggings of his battle dress. He imagined lopping off enemy heads and riding triumphantly on the shoulders of his centurion comrades, a fist raised in victory. Today, however, he must assist the crucifixions at Golgotha on the Hill of Skulls.
Dark clouds tumbled over Jerusalem. The three men hanging from their crosses were still alive.
In mid-afternoon one of the three died. Tired of waiting, a centurion broke the legs of the other two with an iron bar. Screaming, and held only by the nails in their hands, and without the strength to breathe, they suffocated.
The centurion called out to Daniel. ‘Lend me your sword.’
Daniel handed it to him and he drove it into the chest of the man who’d died first, piercing his heart, sending blood onto the rocks at the foot of the cross.
The other crosses were lowered to the ground, and Daniel cut away ropes and levered out nails so the tortured bodies could be loaded onto carts and taken away for burial.
A woman wept beneath the upright cross as the rain fell.
Daniel caught up with the centurion near the bottom of the hill.
‘Do you have my sword?’
‘I left it under the cross, you can retrieve it tomorrow. I want these thieves in the ground as soon as possible,’ the centurion said.
They prised the nails from his hands and feet, then cut him down from the cross and lowered him into the arms of the woman. She stroked his lifeless face as he was lifted from her and carried off the barren hill. A man stared at the stained cross, picked up the abandoned sword and followed the dreadful procession to a garden a short distance to the north.
The servant girl poured the seeds into a stone mortar, ground them as Hector instructed, and stirred the powder into a blue glass filled with wine.
Romanis held the glass up between the stumps of his wrists and drained the potion. Suddenly his chest throbbed. The glass smashed to the floor and he started choking. The servant girl stole into the garden, crying as Romanis’ heart fluttered uselessly. Eyes wide, the last breath went out of him as the shiny falcon danced upon its perch.
Daniel left his barracks, treading the rocky path to the top of Golgotha where the empty cross stood silhouetted in the bright moonlight. He searched around it in widening circles but his sword was gone from the Hill of Skulls.
In the following days, he enquired of it to other centurions, eventually conceding its loss. Hector would surely mention it when next they met.
Daniel did not see Hector again. A month later, he joined thousands of soldiers assembling in the desert south of Thebes. At sunrise on a hot morning he mingled in a column of men stretching wide across the sand. After three mugs of strong coffee he was primed and tense for war. Fear coursed through the voluminous assembly and the ranks rumbled with a din that made the bones in his chest hum.
An unimaginable line of warriors appeared along the top of a ridge to the south of the Roman legions. Shorkaror plunged his stallion down the slope, ploughing great pillows of sand behind him. He stopped, raised an iron sword above his head, and the combined armies, numbering one hundred thousand, made not a sound. Daniel heard his own breathing and the sharp cry of an eagle. Shorkaror lowered his sword and his army f
looded over the ridge in unrelenting waves toward the Roman legions. Shields and swords at the ready and flanked by soldiers on horseback, the Romans marched through the sand as one.
Daniel gripped his iron sword until his knuckles were white, his shield rendered weightless by the adrenalin singing through his veins. An arrow fizzed overhead, another fell harmlessly to his left, snapped in two by the onslaught of feet.
One, fletched with bright green feathers, speared through Daniel’s forehead.
As Hector walked across the bloodied sand on which his army lay slain, he found Daniel, on his back, staring lifelessly at the sun.
Hector trudged through corpses and strewn weapons onto a clear patch of ground, resting on his haunches to survey the horrible landscape.
There were too many men to bury. In time the sands would swallow it all and the vultures were already circling.
Throughout the day, Hector helped collect weapons from the dead and fill the carts arriving to transport the salvageable, including the wounded, to safer ground.
He stood over Daniel, pulled the arrow from his head, broke it in half and threw it on the sand. Turning to the setting sun he said a silent prayer and wandered over a low dune to be alone. He cried despairingly but above all he wept for his nephew.
A few days later Shorkaror would regroup his powerful army to launch the assault on Thebes, meeting little resistance from the decimated Romans.
13
As his leprosy healed, Simon’s pain intensified. He resorted to sporadic hunting in the forest at the bottom of the mountain, determined never to return to Tiberius.
Finally, the excruciating fire in his bones overcame him and he could no longer muster the will to leave his cave to search for food. It took effort to do much at all and sleep was difficult. He buried his head in his hands, screaming to divert the torment. His skin, though cool, felt pricked by a thousand angry wasps. He implored his pagan gods to take the torment from his flesh, making them unkeepable promises.
At dusk, he took a length of hemp rope and headed up the mountain, stopping at a tall tree flushed with spring growth.
He grasped the lowest bough, climbed until he could not see the ground below and tied one end of the rope to a branch above his head.
Tears trickled down his cheeks. He fashioned a noose, put it around his neck, edged to the end of the branch and stepped off. The rush of his body through the leaves ended with a fleshy crack and the shudder of the rope.
The youngest of the three boys saw it first; a body suspended from the leaves, motionless with its feet just above the ground, head hidden in a cloud of foliage. Tentatively, the eldest boy poked at a leg with his finger and the body twirled on the rope, showing off its flawless skin.
The middle boy wandered off, returning with a long stick. Encouraged by the other two he parted the foliage, and instead of a human face he exposed a polished white skull devoid of flesh. Every tooth was bright, free of cavities and stains, and in perfect alignment. A moss-covered rope ran under the jaw up into the tree, suggesting the body had been hanging for months.
Then, without warning, the corpse fell to the ground and the boys scrambled down the slope in fear of their lives as a black cloud slipped across the sun, dousing the mountain in darkness.
14
1792
Geoffrey Cantwell continued his search for the ruins of Jesus’ house in Nazareth; the expedition funded by the outrageously wealthy philanthropist, Sir Timothy Sivewright. Cantwell and his team sought mythological treasures at Sir Timothy’s behest, often without success, until a letter inevitably arrived at their excavation site recalling them to London. In his plush office, Sir Timothy would spread giant maps across his board room table and with a large ‘X’ mark a new destination, hoping Cantwell might uncover an immeasurable hoard of gold or the famed lost diamonds of a long-dead African King.
Sir Timothy, ever the optimist, delighted in the chase, remaining undaunted when the expeditions turned up little more than broken pottery or the odd coin. He happily funded fantastic quests for the antiquities that fired the imagination of men, pouring his limitless supply of shipping royalties into new projects at every opportunity. With boundless enthusiasm and a mind filled with wild theories on a raft of subjects, he’d see Cantwell across another ocean in search of the next Holy Grail.
Cantwell loved the man and his infectious manner. Through his great generosity, he travelled to exotic and sometimes dangerous locations.
Sir Timothy regarded Geoffrey Cantwell as the most brilliant archaeologist alive, and felt some guilt at keeping him from his primary passion for ancient cave art, which to Sir Timothy seemed somewhat mundane. He craved an ancient artefact to immortalise his own name and as long as Cantwell continued in his generous employ, Sir Timothy would indulge his own quest to discover the most unlikely treasures.
Cantwell had recently spent time in the London public library, researching the likely whereabouts of the ancient town of Nazareth. Though not mentioned in the Old Testament, a site to the east of the modern city, bearing the same name, seemed a viable prospect.
Cantwell now found himself on the southern tip of the Lebanon Mountain Range shovelling fat clods of earth. His team had uncovered a stone foundation. Sarcastically, he thought to search for a sign carved Jesus lives here. Then he reminded himself that Sir Timothy had sent him here with no real expectations, and finding anything of importance would be an added bonus, although Cantwell couldn’t even begin to imagine what that might be.
Cantwell oversaw the site as his close friend and chief assistant, John Dixon, mapped the excavation and catalogued any finds. A beefy man with a ruddy complexion from drinking in London’s east end, he was tough, resilient and could swing a pick for longer than anyone Cantwell knew. The team admired him, appointed him their unofficial leader in the field and followed his tireless example. The tight-knit group also showed some bewilderment as they rolled from one project to the next, achieving little, but remaining unquestionably loyal on Sir Timothy’s coattails.
‘Geoffrey, see this,’ Dixon said. ‘There’s a wall of bricks descending below the floor.’
‘Might be an old cellar, John,’ Cantwell said.
They quickly uncovered more of the wall to find it ran in a rectangle. Deeper down, the soil turned sandy and dry. They shovelled it into buckets that were tied to long ropes and hauled up by men at the surface.
By midday they were over their heads with no sign of a solid bottom. Cantwell drove his shovel down, striking something hard that cracked like a branch. Dixon watched Cantwell scrape away sand with his fingers to reveal a long grey bone, broken in two. They called to the surface for soft brushes.
Together they uncovered a complete skeleton that Cantwell guessed was hundreds of years old.
‘Suggest to Sir Timothy these bones are those of Judas Iscariot.’ Dixon said.
‘He’d run with it if he thought I could convince an audience of the royal scientific community of their authenticity. Sir Timothy would have me lecturing through Europe and beyond in the blink of an eye. Unfortunately, this is not Judas. It’s the skeleton of a woman,’ Cantwell said.
‘Maybe it’s Mary Magdalene and how do you know it’s a woman?’ Dixon said.
‘The pelvic anatomy is distinctly female,’ Cantwell said, gently pushing sand away with a brush.
‘No European tour then.’ Dixon broke into a hearty chuckle.
Under the high sun, they decided to finish the excavation and stop for lunch.
Dixon removed dirt near the edge of the wall as Cantwell scraped away at the bottom of the vault, exposing a tarnished black coin. Its reverse side depicted a woman seated on a chair holding a staff. PONTIF MAXIM was stamped around the image. On the obverse was a man’s head encircled with TI CAESAR DIVI AVG F AVGUSTUS. Cantwell found two more similar coins and put them in his pocket.
Then he discovered the strangest objects. Resting on the floor of the tomb, tucked behind the skeleton’s left rib cage, were thr
ee glass ornaments encrusted in sand and dust. He gently put them into a basket, tapped Dixon on the shoulder and they climbed a ladder out of the hole.
‘I’ll fetch a bucket of water,’ Dixon said.
Cantwell washed the ornaments, holding them up to sparkle in the sun. The others stopped what they were doing, crowding around to admire the brightly coloured frogs embedded in the glass.
‘What would Sir Timothy make of these?’ Dixon said.
‘Not sure, John, but the Royal Society will certainly shed some light on them. The glass is pure and the frogs appear well preserved. This may finally give Sir Timothy something to hang his hat on. Let’s break for lunch.’
Under a canvas tarpaulin they sheltered from the hot sun and Cantwell allowed each man a splash of whisky to celebrate the find. The three ornaments sat on the upturned bucket, basking in the warm light denied them for centuries.
After lunch Cantwell and Dixon finished removing sand from around the skeleton but found nothing else of interest. Cantwell called everyone together.
‘Many hands make light work,’ he said, pointing to a crate jammed with shovels.
Cantwell took the lead. In a furious race the men shovelled madly in a burgeoning cloud of dust and flashing iron. Soon, Dixon patted down the final clod of soil and leant on his shovel, blowing and sweating like he’d boxed three rounds - another of his favourite pastimes.
‘Had enough, old timer?’ one man said.
Still puffing, Dixon made to clout the man across the head with the back of his shovel then broke into an infectious chuckle that had them all in fits of laughter. Cantwell placed his arm around Dixon’s broad shoulders and walked him away from the group.
‘John, those ornaments are the work of a master craftsman, and I believe an important discovery. I’ll fire a letter off to Sir Timothy and we’ll continue to explore the area until we receive further instructions.’
‘We might find Jesus’ hammer and his bag of nails,’ Dixon said with a straight face.
The Jesus Germ Page 5