The Inquest

by Stephen Dando-Collins

  “Take me on at your peril, boy!” Martius snarled.

  “Enough, the pair of you!” Varro intervened with a glare. “The damage is done. Dispose of the bodies, Venerius.”

  A faint smile came over Venerius’ lips. He called to the troopers with him, ordering them to fling the pair of corpses from the road.

  “No, cremate them,” Varro snapped. “It is the least you can do.”

  As Varro went to remount, another trooper came galloping up from the direction of the column. When he drew up he reported an accident in the column, and a fatality.

  “Who?” Varro demanded. His immediate concern was for Miriam.

  “The prisoner,” the soldier replied. “The apothecary.”

  Leaving Venerius to make a funeral pyre at the roadside, Varro and his companions rode back to the column. Varro’s baggage train had come to a halt, and dismounted men of the rearguard stood around. Diocles the physician knelt beside the body of Saul ben Gamaliel. The apothecary hung from the chain attached to the manacle on his right wrist, partly over the right side of the cart, partly under the wheel. The chain, six feet in length, was looped around his throat.

  “A broken neck,” Diocles pronounced, coming to his feet with the help of an assistant as Varro slid from his mount.

  “How?” Varro queried testily.

  “Suicide. Or so it would appear.”

  Philippus sat in the cart with a disinterested look on his face.

  “What took place, Evangelist?” Varro demanded.

  Philippus shrugged. “I was beginning to doze off. The first I knew of it, your soldiers were shouting all around me, and my companion was dead.”

  “The apothecary appears to have wound the chain around his neck and then thrown himself over the side of the cart,” said Diocles. “I recommend that the other prisoner’s chain be shortened, to prevent a similar occurrence.”

  “Agreed,” Varro returned absently. He looked at the dead apothecary, and wondered why the man would take his own life. With both Aristarchus and the apothecary dead, he had lost his two best informants. Even if he did locate Matthias ben Naum now, who would identify him?

  XX

  THE ROAD TO THE FOREST

  Kingdom of Nabatea. May, A.D.71

  In the darkness, Varro stood with General Bassus and a group of their officers on the camp wall, looking west toward the Dead Sea. During the day the army had marched out of Judea and into the kingdom of Nabatea, a small state bordering the south-eastern corner of the Dead Sea, a kingdom allied to Rome and dependent on her. Behind the Roman officers, the marching camp set up beside the highway twenty miles south of Macherus was full of life. Cooking fires blazed, thousands of troops dressed casually in their tunics moving about the tented streets, conversation hummed on the night air.

  “Do you see it, Varro?” Bassus pointed into the gloom.

  “I see it, general,” Varro confirmed. On a mountaintop on the far side of the lake, a light flickered, as faint as a distant star.

  “Masada,” Bassus announced. “The Daggermen, advertising their presence.”

  “You think they know that we are here?”

  “They know we are in the vicinity. They have lit a bonfire up there on the fortress ramparts to taunt us, to rub our noses in the fact that they have held that place since they cut the throats of the 3rd Gallica garrison five years ago. I hope they enjoy their fire; they will not be up there for much longer. A month or two at most.” With an arm around the shoulders of his deputy, the twenty-eight-year-old military tribune Quintus Fabius, General Bassus gingerly made his way back down to the floor of the camp. Varro and the others followed. “I’m looking forward to that visit to the hot spring at Tiberias we spoke of, Varro, once the last rebel is dead or in chains,” Bassus resumed. “As soon as we deal with Judas Ben Jairus and his band, I will address our ‘friends’ over there at Masada.”

  “We do know where Ben Jairus is?”

  “My scouts are certain that he is hiding in the Forest of Jardes, in the Negev Valley, accompanied by between two and three thousand men. Tomorrow, we will march another twenty miles down this road. After that, Varro, we turn west, and it will be an overland journey into Idumea, to the Negev. Leave your heavy baggage behind at tomorrow night’s camp. I plan to divest myself of my carts and wagons, and of the prisoners. Those damned people make a speedy march impossible, dragging their feet the way they do. I will leave a thousand auxiliaries to guard baggage and prisoners, and take the remainder of the army after Ben Jairus. If you still intend keeping me company all the way to the Negev, be prepared to march light.”

  As they were nearing the general’s tent, where they were due to dine, Callidus came hurrying up to Varro. “Artimedes had returned from his mission to Caesarea, my lord,” the freedman advised. “The secretary and his escort are just now dismounting at the decuman gate.”

  Excusing himself from the general’s company, Varro hurried away, accompanying Callidus to the camp gate. As they approached, the double gates swung open. Artimedes walked stiffly in through the opening. Decurion Pompeius and six cavalrymen followed, leading the party’s horses. On seeing the questor, Artimedes gave him a wave.

  “Welcome back” called the relieved Varro. Hurrying forward, he embraced his secretary and former tutor.

  “Steady on, my boy.” Unaccustomed to such a display of warmth, Artimedes quickly pulled out of the embrace.

  “I was beginning to think we had lost you, noble Greek,” Varro said, hurt that his display of honest affection had not been reciprocated.

  “You are a hard man to track down, questor. At Jerusalem they told us we might find you at Hebron. From Hebron we retraced our way back to Jerusalem, only to be redirected to Macherus and the road to Nabatea, and here we are at last, exhausted and saddle-sore.”

  “But safe and sound,” said Varro gratefully.

  Artimedes rubbed his numb backside as they walked toward their tents. “I would not lead the cavalryman’s life for any amount of money.”

  “Was your mission a success? Was Aristarchus telling the truth?”

  “You are impatient, as always.” Artimedes used a scolding tutors tone. “To begin with, you should know that Terentius Rufus is no longer Procurator of Judea.”

  “Rufus has left the province?”

  “He set sail from Caesarea while I was there. His replacement Liberius has arrived, and has taken up the post.” He sniffed. “I rather think I preferred your odious cousin. Liberius has not a lot to recommend him.”

  “He will not be a cause of concern to us. Come, come now, what of Aristarchus? You keep me in suspense, ancient Greek. Well, give me the answer! Or do I have to have it tortured out of you?” Varro broke into a grin.

  The diminutive Greek frowned. “I do believe you would do it, too, young man, to repay me for schooldays punishments. Much deserved schooldays punishments, I might add.” This was as close as the secretary would come to sharing a joke with the questor. “Yes, the mission was a success. Prefect Pilatus did have an under secretary by the name of Aristarchus, and Pilatus granted him his freedom just before his return to Rome.”

  “Was it the same man, the man we knew as Aristarchus?”

  “It was clearly the same man. As it happened, the freedman in charge of the archives at Caesarea had been acquainted with Aristarchus; both were in the same profession, and both were servants of the province’s administrator. He was able to describe Aristarchus, right down to the mole on his cheek.” A frown formed on his brow. “Tell me, is there something I should know? You speak of Aristarchus in the past tense.”

  “Aristarchus is dead,” Varro announced, with obvious frustration.

  “Dead?” the shocked secretary came back. “How?”

  “A long story awaits you over dinner, my dear Artimedes. Suffice it to say that we are heading for the Negev Valley in search of the man Aristarchus identified as Matthias ben Naum the apothecary. Last night we found a man, another apothecary, who could identify Ben
Naum, but this morning he too died.”

  “Another death? You have either been very unlucky or very careless in my absence, questor. What were the circumstances?”

  “He took his own life,” Varro replied, sounding dispirited.

  “Why would he do that?”

  “That is what I have been asking myself. My fear is that there is no Matthias ben Naum, and that my witness chose to escape his punishment before he was found out as an inventive liar. He told me that he knew Ben Naum, and that Ben Naum had escaped to the south with the last of the rebels.”

  “Where then lies the problem?”

  “He began by claiming to himself be Ben Naum, so it is difficult to know where his lies ended and the truth began, if his lies ended at all. We must face the possibility, good secretary, that this apothecary concocted everything.”

  “The possibility exists, clearly, but why would he have lied? What could he have hoped to achieve?”

  “Only he could tell us that, and the apothecary has gone to ashes.” Varro went on to confide his concerns. He still did not know why Aristarchus had run off, and had to assume that the scribe had feared being found out for some deception. Through Artimedes’ efforts he now knew that the Greek was who he claimed to be, but how much of his story could be believed? Did both the scribe and the apothecary lie, and was Matthias ben Naum nothing more than a figment of their combined imaginations? That being the case, Varro feared that in traipsing all over the wilds of Judea and Nabatea in search of a non existent Matthias Ben Naum he had embarked on a fool’s errand.

  All the while, walking behind the pair, Callidus had been listening in to the conversation, and now he spoke up. “If I might remind the questor, there was the matter of his dream, and the name of Naum. You must agree, my lord, in the light of that it would be a considerable coincidence if there were no Ben Naum.”

  “Callidus has a point,” Artimedes agreed. Coming to a halt at the end of the camp street containing their tents, he looked his former pupil in the eye. “Clearly, there is only one way to find out, questor. Follow it through to the end. All the way to the end. As I have always taught you.”

  XXI

  THE WITNESS IN THE FOREST

  The Forest of Jardes, Territory of idumea,

  Roman Province of Judea. May, A.D.71

  The heat pressed down on him like a giant hand. Oppressive heat, thick with humidity. As Varro stood on the camp wall, wearing armor and a sword for the first time since the expedition had begun, perspiration flowed like a river from beneath his bronze helmet. It ran down the back of his neck, it trickled into his eyes, it made salty inroads into the corners of his mouth. Wiping his eyes with the back of a clammy hand, he focused on the scene in front of him.

  Spread around the forest in battle order, the soldiers of General Bassus’ army stood frozen in their ranks, silently anticipating the order to go in after the partisans hiding in the trees. The majority of Bassus’ two thousand cavalrymen encircled the small forest. Troopers drooped in the saddle, horses shook their heads and occasionally pawed the ground in their boredom. Just behind their line, auxiliary infantrymen bearing small, light shields decorated with spiral motifs stood in eight cohorts that were distributed every few hundred yards. Their cloth standards hung damp and limp in the humid Negev air. In the forest, the partisans had the benefit of shade, but here, standing in the open for hours on end in their chain-mail jackets, the auxiliaries, some from Egypt, some from the Balkans, some from the Rhine, were baking in the heat. The Egyptians were accustomed to this climate, the Germans were as tough as oak, but several Pannonian infantrymen wilted like delicate flowers, collapsing in their ranks, to be carried away by orderlies.

  East of the trees, occupying a grassy rise overlooking a stream, the heavy infantry of the 10th Legion was formed up, in three lines, each line ten men deep. The soldiers of the 10th, all Roman citizens and natives of western Spain, were olive skinned and dark-haired. The identical outfits, the shining segmented armor, the even rows of glinting helmets, the legion’s charging bull emblem repeated on five thousand long, curved wooden shields, all combined to give the formation a uniformity and an anonymity which reduced lines of men into mere components of a death-dealing machine.

  In front of the formation stood the eagle-bearer of the 10th Legion, proudly holding aloft the golden eagle standard of the 10th. Directly behind him stood the legion’s trumpeters, all in a line, waiting for their general to give the order to go forward, an order they would relay by sounding ‘Advance At The March’ or ‘Charge.’ But General Bassus was lying in a tent in a camp hastily thrown up behind the legion. For the past hour, the general had been only semi-conscious and incapable of giving any order.

  It had taken the column the best part of four days to reach the forest. Even after leaving the heavy baggage at the Nabatea road, the column had made little better than ten miles a day to begin with, over difficult desert terrain in blistering heat, until the wheat-growing district of the Negev Valley provided easier going. The cavalry had preceded the foot soldiers, and had quickly surrounded the forest while the infantry came up.

  Bassus had been impatient to seal off all possibility of escape and then move in quickly before dark and kill or capture every last rebel hiding in the forest with Judas ben Jairus. Delayed on the march by severe abdominal pain, the general had himself arrived on the scene some hours after his army, coming up in his chariot and with a cavalry escort. Seeing that the forest of evergreens stood thicker than he had imagined, Bassus had second thoughts about a full-on frontal assault. Legion formations were at their best in the open or storming a rampart, but in tightly-packed trees their ranks and their discipline would suffer, and heavy casualties might result.

  The general’s mind was already on Masada, last Jewish bastion in Judea and a reputedly impregnable fortress. He would need every man he had to take Masada and draw the curtain on the Jewish Revolt. Once that was done he could rest, secure in the knowledge that he had fulfilled his orders and done his duty by Caesar. To achieve his goal, and rapidly so, Bassus could not afford heavy casualties here at the Forest of Jardes, and the general had decided to consult the gods before launching an attack. In the quest for guidance a goat had been sacrificed to Mars, god of war. The entrails of the animal had been found to be deformed. Reading this ill omen as a danger signal, Bassus had held off giving the order to advance into the forest. His anxiety had brought on an excruciating attack of pain and abdominal cramps, and the general had collapsed.

  Varro heard shouting in the camp behind him. He and his colleagues, who stood on the camp rampart by the pretorian gate, looked around. Tribune Fabius, deputy commander of the 10th, had emerged from the general’s tent and was issuing orders to waiting centurions and prefects. Varro looked to Martius, who stood farther along the rampart, closer to the pretorium. “Did you hear what was said, Marcus?” he called.

  “No, but I will find out,” Martius replied, before shimmying down a ladder. He soon collared one of Fabius’ centurions. The pair spoke animatedly for a few moments before Martius climbed back up to the ramparts.

  “Well?” Varro queried impatiently.

  “It seems the general mentally rejoined us long enough to instruct Fabius to arm the auxiliaries with axes,” said Martius with an amused smile. “Bassus has decided to cut down the Forest of Jardes. Defoliating the Jews, and eliminating our firewood shortage at the same time. Very clever really.”

  Now Crispus called out. “Questor! Look!” He was pointing toward the forest.

  Varro and Martius both followed the prefect’s gaze, to see a lone rider slowly coming out of the trees. He wore a white tunic and rode with his arms horizontally outstretched, to signify that he was unarmed.

  “A Jewish envoy, it seems,” Martius remarked. “This should prove interesting.”

  They watched as Tribune Fabius was summoned to the camp wall. Once he came up onto the ramparts and sighted the rider for himself he issued an order. A troop of Roman cavalr
y galloped to the rider and surrounded him. The man dismounted, was searched for weapons by two troopers, and was then led through the 10th Legion’s ranks toward the camp. As he was brought in the pretorian gate, Varro and his officers came down off the wall and joined Tribune Fabius and several of his subordinates who had also descended. The combined group stood just inside the gate, waiting for the Jew.

  The envoy was an athletic figure in his twenties, with curly black hair and a perfectly sculpted face. “My name is Jacob,” he said in a firm voice as he came to a halt in front of Fabius. “I claim the neutrality afforded ambassadors of peace by all nations.”

  Fabius, himself a handsome-faced man, although slim and slight in comparison to the young Jewish ambassador, folded his arms. “You bring a message for my general, Jew?” he tersely inquired.

  “My leader, Judas ben Jairus, seeks terms for an honorable cessation of hostilities,” Jacob replied. As he spoke, he ran an analytical eye over the assembled Roman officers, assessing their rank and caliber.

  “General Bassus offers no terms,” Fabius haughtily replied. “He will accept only total and immediate disarmament and unconditional surrender.” As Fabius knew, this had been Bassus’ tenet since embarking on his campaign.

  Jacob’s eyes returned to Fabius. “Judas will not agree to unconditional surrender,” the envoy advised unemotionally. “He is prepared to disarm, if you let the people with him go free into the desert, to start a new life.”

  “Impossible!” Fabius snapped. “Go back and tell your leader that his options are twofold: unconditional surrender, or death.”

  “Sent to receive terms, I won’t return without them,” Jacob defiantly declared.

  “Impudent Jew!” Fabius exploded. “You will not dictate to me!” He nodded to the cavalrymen of the escort. “Lash him to a cross up on the camp wall, where his friend Judas ben Jairus can see him. That will be General Bassus’ answer.”