Avenger of Blood

by John Hagee

  Quintus paused for a breath, and a faint cry emanated from his arms.

  Agatha gasped at the sound.

  “She needs to be fed,” Quintus said quietly but urgently. He looked around at the crowd that had followed him into the peristyle. Gregory, the steward, and some of the household staff stood gaping at the scene from the colonnade.

  “Upstairs,” Quintus told Agatha. “Quickly.”

  Rebecca had never seen Quintus so agitated. She sprang into action. “Use my bedroom. I’ll keep the children,” she said, prying Aurora from Agatha’s arms, “unless you want me to come with you.”

  “Yes, please,” Agatha said, then she looked at Quintus, who nodded his permission.

  Rebecca called for Gregory to take Victor. Then she turned to the steward. “When Marcellus arrives,” she said, “send him to my room immediately.”

  Rebecca ran through the house as fast as she could with a toddler in her arms, and climbed the stairs behind Quintus and Agatha. If she had been surprised by Agatha’s early-morning visit, Rebecca was completely stunned when she entered the bedroom and watched Quintus place the bundle on the bed and unwrap it.

  She had known it was a baby because she’d heard it cry the same time Agatha did, but the sight of the naked newborn, dirty and whimpering, still shocked Rebecca speechless.

  Aurora wasn’t. She climbed out of Rebecca’s arms and onto the bed. “Baby,” the toddler said happily. “My baby?”

  “Yes,” Agatha said, “Papa found us a baby—a girl, just like you.”

  Aurora crawled closer and wrinkled her nose. “Baby stinks.”

  Quintus laughed nervously. “I didn’t take time to clean her up,” he told his wife. “I was so surprised to find her alive, and so frantic to bring her to you to nurse . . .”

  Agatha loosened her tunic and dropped it to her waist, then reached for the baby. Quintus propped pillows at the head of the bed, and Agatha leaned back, holding the baby to her breast. It took several tries for the infant to latch on and begin to suck.

  Rebecca was moved by the sight. Agatha, tears coursing down her cheeks, nursed the tiny, smelly newborn, Aurora was curled up contentedly beside her mother, and Quintus stood over them all with an adoring expression on his long, thin face. What a picture they made.

  Where did Quintus get the baby? Rebecca wondered. Was that the illegal part? She had a sudden, horrific thought that almost buckled her knees. Had Quintus stolen this child?

  Quintus knelt by the bed and gently stroked the baby’s foot. “She’s bigger than the other ones,” he said. “I think that’s why she was still alive.”

  “She looks like she might be a few days old,” Agatha said. “Perhaps the father was away when she was born, so the mother got to keep her for a while before he came home and found out it was a girl he didn’t want.”

  “I searched the garbage dump twice before I found her,” Quintus said.

  Rebecca couldn’t stand it any longer. She sat down on the foot of the bed. “You found this baby in the garbage?”

  “Yes,” Agatha said, looking down at the discarded baby. “Just like I found Aurora.” Lifting her chin defiantly, Agatha looked up at Rebecca. “And I’m keeping this one too.”

  Found Aurora? In the garbage? Rebecca could not comprehend the thought that Aurora was not Agatha’s baby. Agatha had said she almost died in childbirth, and she had always nursed Aurora. How could that be?

  The dump? That was where Quintus and Agatha had been sneaking off to in the early morning hours?

  Nothing could have surprised Rebecca more. She had no idea what to say or do.

  Quintus and Agatha were good people, she reminded herself. Even if they’d done something that was illegal, she wouldn’t pass judgment on them without hearing their story.

  At dawn on Tuesday, Jacob went to bed and slept for two hours. He woke feeling refreshed but sore. His ribs were bruised from hitting the gravel when Tarquinius had kept him from being struck by an arrow.

  Damian’s arrow. Jacob had no way of knowing for sure if it had been an assassination attempt, but that was his guess. Damian might have been shooting just to create panic among his intended victims.

  Or he could have heard Antony shout Jacob’s name and specifically aimed at him.

  When Jacob went to the triclinium for breakfast, he found the table littered with bowls of half-eaten food, but no diners. Hearing voices, he followed the sound to the atrium.

  “Good morning,” Antony said, his voice weary with fatigue.

  Jacob returned the greeting and took a seat on the bench next to Antony. Polycarp was seated on a low-backed chair, while Verus occupied the other bench. Tarquinius stood over Verus, wrapping a fresh bandage around his upper left arm.

  “What happened?” Jacob asked.

  Antony answered with a question. “You didn’t hear the commotion?”

  “No. My bedroom is at the very back of the house.”

  Tarquinius said, “The minute Verus here stuck his head outside this morning, Damian unleashed a barrage of arrows. One caught him in the arm. Nothing serious, fortunately.”

  “I’ll say this,” Verus said, wincing as Tarquinius tied off the bandage. “Damian is either a very poor marksman, or he’s not shooting to kill.”

  “The latter,” Antony said. “Right now he merely wants to instill fear in us.”

  “Intimidation would be his style,” Jacob added.

  Antony asked Verus, “Were you able to see the archers? Could you tell how many there are?”

  Verus shook his head. “I didn’t see anybody. But it was like Tarquinius said last night. The arrows came too fast for there to be only one man.”

  “It’s probably just Damian and the man we saw yesterday.” Tarquinius walked over to the door that led to the courtyard, but he didn’t open it. “I wish we could see inside that vacant house across the street. That’s definitely where they’re holed up. We need to get in there and take them out.”

  “How are we going to get in there,” Verus asked, “if we can’t leave the house without getting shot at?”

  Tarquinius pounded a meaty fist against the door, then turned back toward the group. “That man killed my wife,” he said loudly, pointing in the direction of the house across the street, “and he’s planning on killing the bishop. I heard it myself. He repeated the threat to Antony. We have to do something to stop Damian.”

  Polycarp had been silent to this point, but he spoke up now. “Let me make something clear. I will not have you—any of you—take a life in order to protect mine. Self-defense is warranted, not murder. Keep that in mind.”

  “If we can stop him without killing him,” Jacob said, “we will. Agreed?”

  One by one, the others agreed.

  The group returned to the dining room to finish their meal, and as they reclined around the table, they continued to discuss Damian’s plot and how to thwart it.

  “It seems to me,” Jacob said, “that if Damian wanted to destroy Polycarp by fire, he would do what he’s doing now—keep us confined here, afraid to go outside for fear of being shot. And when he finally tires of that, he could shoot flaming arrows into the house and set it on fire that way.”

  “Except,” Antony said, tearing off a piece of bread and passing the loaf to Tarquinius, “that hasn’t been Damian’s pattern with the previous arsons. He’s been saturating the structure with oil and then throwing a lighted torch to create a tremendous combustion all at once.”

  As Antony explained how the fires at the inn and the blacksmith shop had been set, Jacob dipped his bread in the bowl and sopped up some porridge. He tried to picture the inferno the blazing oil would create.

  “There’s no way you can escape a fire like that,” Antony said, “and no way to put it out. No way to keep it from spreading, either, without a miracle.”

  “Then we have to find a way to stop Damian before he can do that,” Jacob said. “The only question is how.”

  At noon, long after Linus had cle
ared the dining table, they were still looking for an answer to the question.

  Jacob finally made a suggestion he would never have considered a year ago. “What if we went to the authorities and asked them to stop Damian? I know they wouldn’t have believed you,” he said to Antony, “when it would have been just your word against Damian’s.

  “But now the whole neighborhood can see what he’s doing—and they’re in danger too. Anyone who ventures down the road could be hit by a stray arrow. The authorities have to step in now, don’t they?”

  “If it weren’t a known Christian presenting the complaint, they would,” Antony said. “You know how it is better than I do. Sometimes when we ask for help they don’t take us seriously, and sometimes we wind up getting in more trouble than we were already in. It can be tricky.”

  “I think it would be worth a try, though,” Polycarp said. “We owe it to the civil authorities to give them a chance to do their job.”

  Tarquinius sounded doubtful. “Verus said it earlier: We’d still have to get past Damian’s arrows just to go for help.”

  “The ravine out back,” Verus said. “It would be rough going, but if you follow it for about a half-mile, there’s a place you could climb out by another road that leads to the main part of town.”

  Jacob stood. “I think we should do it. And I’ll volunteer to go.”

  “I’ll go with you,” Antony said. “I’ve been dealing with the local government and know how to contact the proper authorities.”

  “Both of you are staying right here,” Verus said firmly. “I’m the one who knows the way. I’ve lived here all my life, and I know where to find the constable. And besides all that, I’m a hunter. I have a couple of bows at home and plenty of arrows. I’ll bring them back— just in case we need to provide the authorities with covering fire.”

  “Go, then,” Jacob said. “The rest of us will pray you’re able to secure the cooperation of the constable.”

  “I’ll help you climb out a window and fasten it behind you,” Antony said. He and Verus walked out of the dining room.

  Tarquinius looked at Polycarp and Jacob. “I don’t know how to pray,” the innkeeper said. “But if you’ll tell me the words, I’ll say them.”

  Polycarp rose from the sofa. “When you know the one you’re speaking to,” the bishop said, “the words will come easily.” He walked over to the innkeeper and motioned for Jacob to join them. “Come,” he said to Tarquinius, “let us introduce you to the Lord to whom we pray.”

  The three men knelt on the floor of the dining room, and when they rose sometime later, a new name had been added to the Book of Life.

  When the baby had finished nursing, Agatha asked Rebecca to help bathe her.

  “There’s fresh water in the basin,” Rebecca said. She took the baby while Agatha refastened her tunic, then got a clean towel to spread on the washstand. Rebecca lay the baby on the towel and Agatha dipped a cloth into the water, wringing it into the bronze basin.

  Quintus held Aurora, who watched the proceedings quietly but with intense curiosity. “My baby,” she told her father several times.

  “My baby too,” Quintus said with a proud smile.

  “Did someone really throw this little girl away?” Rebecca asked. She held the baby, who stiffened her tiny fists and wailed, while Agatha washed away the filth and stench of the garbage heap. “Who could do something like that?”

  Agatha knew exactly the kind of person who was capable of such a heinous act. But before she could answer, Marcellus and Livia arrived.

  The medical officer checked the newborn over carefully. “I can’t say as I’ve had many babies for patients,” he said with a grin, “but this one looks all right to me. She has no fever, her color is good, and she’s strong enough to cry.”

  Rebecca went to the chest where she kept Victor’s clothes and began to select some baby things for the little one. When the baby was dressed and swaddled in a blanket, Agatha laid her in Victor’s crib. Clean and well fed, the newborn immediately went to sleep.

  Her heart overflowing with joy and her eyes brimming with tears, Agatha turned her face upward and said, “Thank You, Lord. Thank You for giving me another baby.”

  Still holding Aurora, Quintus put a hand on his wife’s shoulder and joined in her thanksgiving. “We praise You, Jesus, for this indescribable gift.”

  After a moment he said, “Agatha, it’s time we tell our friends why we’ve been searching the dump for abandoned babies.”

  Agatha nodded. “All right,” she said slowly as she sat down in the chair next to the crib. Talking about the past would bring back memories Agatha would rather not revisit, but she owed her friends an explanation, especially now that she’d involved them.

  Quintus sat on the floor beside her, and Agatha instinctively reached a hand over to her husband. As he grasped her hand, Agatha took a deep breath and began to tell how she had lost one daughter and found another.

  At the end of her long story Agatha concluded, “I named her Aurora because it was not long after dawn when I found her at the dump that day. And it was the dawn of a new life for me—for the both of us.”

  Quintus had held his wife’s hand as she told the entire story. He asked her now, “Have you thought of a name for this one?”

  “I was thinking of Dorinda. It means ‘lovely gift.’”

  “That’s a beautiful name,” Livia said.

  “What will you tell people?” Marcellus asked. “If you suddenly show up with a baby, they are bound to ask questions.”

  “If it’s somebody I don’t know very well,” Agatha said thoughtfully,

  “I would just tell them that the baby’s mother couldn’t take care of her, so Quintus and I agreed to take her in. I would try not to elaborate beyond that.”

  She explained to Livia, “No one knew my background when Peter first took me in and brought me here. I got very good at being evasive when people would ask me questions. For the longest time I was terrified that someone would know I’d taken their baby and they would try to get her back.”

  “But they had thrown her away—left her to die,” Livia said.

  “Exactly. And I finally realized that if they hadn’t wanted her to begin with, they weren’t likely to change their minds.”

  Agatha paused for a moment, then finished addressing Marcellus’s original question. “But when it comes to our Christian friends, I think we should tell them the whole story. You were right about that,” she said to Quintus. “I should have talked about this before. I let shame keep me from speaking out, but I feel better for having said something now. Who knows? There may be other women, even women in the church, who have also been forced to give up a child. Maybe it would help them to know they weren’t alone.”

  “Perhaps it would motivate the church to do something,” Rebecca said. “You were right when you told me earlier that what you were doing was technically illegal but the right thing to do. We can’t just sit by and let these babies die of exposure.”

  “So many times,” Quintus said, “I would be searching the dump, and I would think of the story Jesus told about the shepherd who left the ninety and nine in the fold while he searched for the one lost sheep. When I would get weary, when I would think that finding another baby alive would be hopeless, I would remember that. ‘Would Jesus quit looking?’ I would ask myself.”

  He told them about the voice he’d heard that morning, the one that had said, Look again.

  “So I kept looking. And see what happened?” Quintus gazed at his new daughter, still sleeping peacefully in the crib.

  “You know something?” he asked Agatha.

  “What?” she said.

  “I’m going back to the dump in the morning and look again. I’ll probably look every morning for the rest of my life. I’ll bury the dead and rescue the living. And if, God willing, we find more children than we can raise, then we’ll find good homes for them.”

  Agatha beamed at his vow to keep looking for aband
oned children. “I wish there was a way we could convince society to give up this cruel custom. If people knew there were alternatives . . .” She trailed off and sighed. “Well, perhaps someday we’ll put an end to it.”

  37

  AS THE AFTERNOON WORE ON, the men trapped inside Polycarp’s house grew more tense. Tarquinius kept asking how much longer they were going to wait before doing something, and Jacob kept reminding him that Verus had not left to find the constable until noon.

  “We just have to be patient a little while longer,” Antony said.

  The three men took turns pacing the flagstone floor of the atrium. Sometimes they all paced at once. Polycarp was closeted in one of the back rooms with his two students, beseeching God for deliverance.

  Taking a break from marching back and forth, Jacob sat on one of the benches. To pass the time, he began to tell Antony all about Livia. “I never expected to spend so long in Cappadocia,” Jacob said after he’d told the story of encountering the trade caravan and following Livia and Gregory to the cave house. “Never thought I’d fall in love and get married—not the way it happened, I mean. But God had a hand in it, and I couldn’t be happier with the way things turned out.”

  “I can’t wait to meet your wife.” Antony was seated on the bench, leaning forward with his forearms resting on his knees. As he spoke, he cast a worried look at the door to the courtyard.

  “We’re going to get out of this alive,” Jacob told him. “You’ll meet my wife soon—and you’ll marry my sister.”

  “I want that more than anything—I need that.” Antony stood and stretched, rolling his head from side to side to relieve the tension. “I’ve been praying this would all come to an end so I could go home to Rebecca. I just never imagined the end would be so . . . so . . .” He shrugged. “I don’t even know how to describe it.”

  Tarquinius quit pacing and took the seat Antony had vacated. “I’ve been thinking,” he said. “Damian can’t have an unlimited supply of ammunition. He has to run out of arrows sometime.”

  “Who knows what kind of supply he has?” Antony asked.