“Halt,” a legionnaire barked in Aramaic. “Stop right there, you Hebrew cur, or I will gut you like a fish. Now what have we here? What are you doing sneaking around here in the darkness?”
“And with a horse yet,” remarked the other dark figure. “We have to march across this foul land and this vagabond rides a horse.”
Two more soldiers stepped out of the darkness, blocking the road ahead. Without hesitation, Viktor whipped his mount into action, the pony rearing up and plunging directly toward the legionnaires. The soldiers were ready for him. Sidestepping the horse, one yanked the bridle from Viktor’s hands while the other swatted him from his perch with the blunt end of a spear. Taking the blow square across his chest, Viktor tumbled backwards over the horse’s rump and hit the road hard, the air forced from his lungs with a painful grunt. Staggering to his feet, he gravely regretted his carelessness. He had walked right into their trap. Alone and unarmed, he was now at the mercy of the enemy. Turning to the soldier who had spoken first, he switched to imperious formal Latin.
“You are making a serious mistake,” he proclaimed. “I am the son of Septimus Salvo of Caesarea. I am a Roman citizen and I will not be treated in this manner. My uncle is the supreme centurion of the 10th Legion, Lucilius Germanicus. You will release me immediately or he will have you all flogged and you will spend the remainder of your miserable lives at the oars of a galley.”
The soldiers stepped back, mouths agape, and Viktor used their hesitation to take the offensive. Employing his martial arts skills, he surprised the nearest legionnaire, quickly disarming him and throwing him to the ground. Grabbing the soldier’s javelin, Viktor spun around and cracked it across the other legionnaire’s wrist, breaking bone and sending his sword cartwheeling out into the darkness. Wielding the javelin like a bojutsu master, he charged the remaining soldiers, who backed off, warily brandishing their swords before them, one still grasping the pony’s bridle, the other shouting to his comrades for help. In the darkness beyond, Viktor could see more legionnaires scrambling up onto the road and heading in his direction. Swinging the javelin, he kept the two soldiers at bay while he decided whether to stand and fight or leave the pony behind. His training told him to retreat and live to fight another day. But the blood raging through his veins had a whole different agenda. He longed to teach the abusive invaders a bitter lesson. As the rest of the encampment sprinted toward him, weapons in hand, Viktor experienced a momentary stasis, a psychological inertia, an inexplicable desire to have it over with. To end it all right there. To go out in a furious blaze of glory. The precious seconds ticked past. Soon, the decision would be out of his hands.
It was too late now to retreat. If he turned to run, they would butcher him like a helpless lamb. And a helpless lamb he was not. The soldiers were almost on top of him, looking like murderous phantasms with empty black shadows where their faces should have been, their upraised blades poised to strike him down. Now it was time to fight. To fight and die protecting his homeland, as he had so solemnly pledged in that other life. Destiny had brought him full circle. It was a logical and elegant conclusion to his journey, and he wholly accepted it. A calmness settled over him. His vision sharpened. Leveling the javelin, he planted his feet and coolly searched for an opening in the enemy’s armor, an exposed flank, an unprotected throat. Now, nearly within striking distance, he braced for impact as three of the sprinting Romans suddenly spilled headlong into the dust, seemingly cut down in mid-stride. Then two more went down as a mass of dark forms swarmed the road between him and the attacking legionnaires. The groups clashed, men shouted, cursed, screamed in agony.
The two soldiers holding Viktor’s pony dropped its bridle and advanced, their movements taut with deadly intent. Swinging their swords in quick lethal arcs, one stalked directly toward him while the other circled around behind.
“So you lead us into an ambush,” the legionnaire growled. “We told those fools to post more guards. But they did not listen. And now they die. And so will you, you sly Hebrew fox.”
With their quarry caught firmly between them, they moved in for the kill. Sidestepping the heavy blades, Viktor backpedaled, attempting to create some maneuvering space. The legionnaires followed, relentlessly closing the gap, their swords cleaving the night air with a dreadful hiss. Thrusting and parrying with the javelin, Viktor managed to fend off the assault, sparks flashing in the darkness as steel met steel. Moving backwards, his eyes intently searching for an advantage, he found none. He fought on, aware that his was a completely defensive and unsustainable tactic.
The main battle had grown in intensity. Yet the sounds of that brutal fight were barely audible over the rasp of his own breath and the grunting of the two soldiers as they swung their blades. His arms weary, his weapon bent and gouged, Viktor began to face the real possibility of his own bloody and painful death. He had underestimated his opponents. These two were not displaced peasants, not rabble. These were two well-trained professional soldiers, intent on his destruction, skilled in weapons with which he had little experience. But he would not run. If he was to die this night, he was going to take one of them with him. So he fought on, desperately searching for an opening. Deflecting a vicious blow that would have cleaved him in two, he watched in horror as his weapon shattered, leaving him holding a jagged stump of pike shaft. The two legionnaires stopped and lowered their weapons, pausing to savor their victim’s helplessness, waiting in leering anticipation for the tearful pleas, the inevitable cry for mercy. It did not come. They, too, had underestimated their opponent. In their gloating arrogance, Viktor saw his opening and sprang into action. Pouncing on the nearest soldier, he plunged the broken shaft into the man’s throat, slipping it into the vulnerable gap between breastplate and chin guard. The wounded soldier gurgled in agony and collapsed to the ground. Viktor held tight, riding the body down to the dust of the road, jamming the rod as deep as it would go. Rolling clear, he looked up to see the second soldier standing over him, both hands clutching the hilt of his sword as he raised it high over his head. That’s it, Viktor thought. I’m done for. Time slowed to a crawl as a prayer raced through his mind. HaShem is my light and my salvation, whom shall I fear? HaShem is the stronghold of my life, of whom shall I be afraid? Though a host should encamp against me, my heart shall not fear…
A high-pitched hiss split the air, interrupting his prayer. Then a solid thud, followed by a second and a third. The soldier’s face immediately changed from rage to surprise, the light in his eyes winking out, his brain acknowledging his sudden demise before his body had the chance to react. Dropping his weapon, he toppled to the ground like a felled tree, three long arrows bristling from his back. Pushing himself off the ground, Viktor retrieved the fallen legionnaire’s sword, and rushed to join the battle that still raged along the darkened road.
CHAPTER 42
Present-Day Israel
Only after all his questions had been answered, the validity of the research substantiated, and his role clearly defined, did Dr. Robert Jankowski agree to join the Team. The project was an extraordinary endeavor, a determined attempt to understand the nature and mechanism of time. Yes! That’s right! Time! He had to join them. How could a serious scholar do otherwise? He was downright honored to be a part of such groundbreaking research. Research that would undoubtedly be a watershed in mankind’s understanding of the cosmos. It boggled the mind. Just the potential applications to his field of study were utterly astounding. It would be the dawn of a new era in archeology. And he would be right there on the cutting edge, the architect of a revolutionary new mode of investigation. The “go and see it for yourself” school of archeology. The days of guessing and hypothesizing would be over. If things worked out, he himself might be able to experience antiquity with his own two eyes. It was a dream come true. He simply had to go along for the ride. How could he do otherwise?
Once Robert bought into the idea that time travel was physically possible, he had absolutely no philosophical problems with t
he concept. Though he was a spiritual man and believed deeply in the existence of God, he had never experienced any difficulty reconciling science with his religious beliefs. The very issues that drove many scientists toward atheism were the same reasons that continually reinforced his belief in the existence of a creator. Just because humankind had the capacity to understand, manipulate, and even duplicate the physical cosmos, for Robert it did not disprove the existence of God. Quite the contrary. He believed God had given mankind the curiosity and the mental capacity to grasp the wonder of the cosmos so that they might bear witness to the enormity of his power and his majesty. Even in the absence of a personal relationship with God—such as he had—he felt that any intelligent person could still appreciate the enormous magnificence of creation. Robert couldn’t understand why science and religion were so mutually exclusive to so many people, especially scientists. He couldn’t understand why the very same people who labored to unravel the workings of the cosmos could not accept that it all came from somewhere. The current theory proposed that it had all “just happened.” That everything in the universe was originally contained in an infinitesimal singularity that burst forth and “just happened” to evolve into everything contained in the cosmos. Everything. Now that was hard for him to believe. But Robert had learned long ago that people will believe what they want to believe. And secure in his own faith, he never felt the need to proselytize.
Robert believed that physics, no matter how fantastical, was merely another mechanism by which to understand God’s creation, just like biology and genetics and evolution and mathematics. All these fields endeavored to identify the systems and rules and relationships in the cosmos. They didn’t constitute belief systems unto themselves. Order did not arise out of nothingness by chance. In Robert’s opinion, the cosmos was way too complex and glorious to have just happened, regardless of the length of time involved. He believed that such complexity and order could never arise out of nothingness by mere chance. Never. A billion monkeys typing on a billion typewriters for a billion years could never, by accident, write the equivalent of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Never. He doubted they could even write a sit-com. That was an anecdote he loved to share with his students. It was all God’s creation, from the molecules of his desk, to the neurotransmitters in his brain, to the newborn stars forming from clouds of molecular dust a million light-years away. The entire cosmos was one big fantastically interconnected construction. Time travel? Why not? It was just another component of that limitless and awesomely intricate creation.
So Robert settled into his tiny office at the Team’s headquarters and got down to work; his primary assignment, to devise a way to verify the successful placement of a living subject into the past. It was simply a question of communication. How could a subject communicate with the present across intervening millennia? He already had the answer. He had been dealing with that very same issue nearly every day of his professional life, uncovering and deciphering inscriptions and prayers and chronicles written long ago by people long gone. To him, it was more a matter of logistics. How could he insure that the message got delivered to the right people, in the right place, at the right time? He had the answer to those questions, too.
In northern Israel, not twenty-five kilometers from the Team’s research facility, a crew of graduate students was working to uncover a newly discovered necropolis. Located near the ancient site of Tel Megiddo, it was proving to be a fairly common grouping of Hebrew crypts, cut out of the exposed bedrock and dating back to the first century of the Common Era. It was one of the many routine investigations that Tel Aviv University was conducting for the Israel Antiquities Authority and one of the many archeological digs under Dr. Robert Jankowski’s direct control. The site being of minor historic significance, Robert had delegated the fieldwork to a team of his most promising and reliable students. The dig was off the beaten path, and perfectly unexceptional, and perfectly suited for what he had in mind.
At the next Team meeting, he presented his strategy to the physicists. Proposing to use the Tel Megiddo dig as a sort of trans-millennial mailbox, he assured them that a message posted in a currently unexcavated area of the tomb complex could be recovered by his field team with no fuss and zero publicity. And by sending a subject so deep into humankind’s past and altering a heretofore unexcavated piece of archeology, as yet undocumented by contemporary historians, the temporal impact would be lessened. It seemed like a credible plan, and with only a few dissenting opinions the Team enthusiastically endorsed his proposal.
CHAPTER 43
Ancient Palestine (circa 30 CE)
A hooded figure ripped a chunk of meat from the goat carcass that sizzled enticingly on a spit above the firepit and tossed it over the heads of his comrades. Viktor snatched it out of the chill night air and tore into the charred flesh. Hot grease burned his lips, dripped from his hands, and streamed down his dirty arms. But that did little to deter him. He hadn’t eaten in two days. And the tough, soot-blackened goat meat was magnificent. Hunched over his windfall, he didn’t follow the progress of the hooded figure as the man stepped over the reclining warriors, working his way through the concentric rings of his followers. The headmen sat nearest the warmth, then the fighters, the porters, and the boys. Viktor occupied the shadowy perimeter with the shepherds and the women, busily licking the grease from his fingers. Startled, he looked up as the hooded figure lowered a flaming brand before his face.
“Who are you?” the man demanded.
“I am a traveler making my way to Jerusalem for the feast days.”
With a sudden fluid motion, the man flung his torch out into the darkness, where it shattered against an unseen boulder with a radiant starburst of glowing embers. He stood transfixed for a moment, as if divining some secret meaning from the pyrotechnic display, and then turned back to Viktor, his voice low and calmly menacing.
“I will ask you one more time. If you do not speak the truth, you will not live to see the sunrise. Do you understand?” For emphasis, the man placed his hand on the wicked curved sword that hung from his belt. He seemed to tower over the assemblage, though he was not a physically imposing man. Thin, rawboned, and a bit timeworn, he still exuded absolute authority. And for some reason he looked familiar…the striking blue eyes that peered out from the shadow of his hood, the virile charisma, the cadence of his speech. Viktor had seen him in battle. The man’s chutzpah was not a pretense. He was a fearless warrior. He would not be easily fooled. Viktor decided to tell as much of the truth as he dared.
“I am on my way to Jerusalem for Passover. I come from Caesarea by way of the Galilee. I work for a Roman merchant there. I have been on the road for many days and have had a hard time of it. I thank you for rescuing me from those soldiers. You saved my life. I will tell you whatever you want to know.”
The man dropped his hand, releasing the sword. “You have already told me much,” he said. “I heard you speak Latin to that Roman scum back there in the valley. How is it you speak Latin?”
“My employer taught me.”
“Are you a Jew?”
“I am.”
“Why did you tell them you are the son of a Roman?”
“I was trying to save myself. Most of those legionaries are not very bright. They are little more than slaves themselves, displaced peasants serving their overlords for a silver coin. I thought I could bluff my way past the checkpoint.”
“Those were not peasants, my friend. Those were the personal guards of Tribune Julianus Flaccus Belisarius, son of the illustrious Roman senator. A very important man. We have been following him for days. We were about to silence the sentries when you created the perfect diversion. They were so intent on killing you, we took them totally by surprise. Unfortunately, that pig Belisarius made good his escape. He hightailed it back to Alexandrium and left his men behind to die. Someday he will not be so lucky. What were you doing out there on the road in the middle of the night?”
“I was trying to avoid the Romans.”
The hooded man threw back his head and laughed heartily. Many around the firepit joined in.
“That plan did not work out very well for you, my friend. But it was beneficial to us. You handle yourself pretty well in a fight. You did some things I have never seen before. The way you use your hands and feet. You have many weapons at your disposal. Where did you learn that?”
Viktor hesitated, the seconds stretching out in a tense silence. Many ears were listening now, many eyes watching, blazing with the reflected light of the campfire. In commando training he had studied the martial arts. As a hobby, he had perfected a lethal fusion of several disciplines. How could he explain it? The hooded man impatiently studied his face as Viktor desperately searched for an appropriate response. Finally he spoke.
“My name is Viktor. My father was captain of the guards at the Temple of Leontopolis on the Nile River. He was a military man and taught me what I know about battle. When I was still a boy, he denounced his Jewish heritage and became a mercenary, fighting for the pagan pharaoh. He turned away from God. He shamed me and my family. It is something I have to live with. I will speak no more about him.”
The Emmanuel Project Page 13