Dovilin and the bishop, however, were not so impressed, even angry.
Dovilin said, “You call yourself a Jew and yet you are not circumcised?”
“My mother was a Spaniard, sir,” he said, quickly putting on his loin cloth and tunic, at which point Cota disappeared out her archway. “Aren’t we all free in Christ?”
Dovilin seemed to admit there was little argument to that, but Bishop Paul said sharply, “Don’t you dare quote Scripture to me, boy. Do you understand? Can you even read?”
“No, sir. But I hear, and faith comes from hearing the Word of God.”
“I told you to stop quoting Scripture, Ben-Deker,” the bishop said, emphasizing Samuel’s Jewish surname. “I have my own test for you.”
Athanasius feigned confusion. “I am being tested? I do not understand.”
“You don’t have to,” Dovilin said calmly. “Just answer the good bishop. He is the leader of the church here in Cappadocia and only wants to keep wolves away from the sheep.”
“Wolves?” Athanasius said in surprise.
“Yes, Ben-Deker,” said Bishop Paul. “Now answer me this: Who killed Jesus? The Jews or the Romans?”
Athanasius paused as the bishop gave a satisfied nod toward Dovilin, who was watching him closely. It was a cruel test, Athanasius realized, to put upon poor Samuel Ben-Deker. Obviously, as a nominal Jew, he had to say the Romans. But his understanding of the church in Cappadocia was that the Christians here blamed the Jews, or rather their religious leaders, and this was a source of division.
He was about to say, “Both,” when the impatient bishop started badgering him. “Come now, Ben-Deker, this isn’t a trick question,” he said. “Not for a real Christian.”
“Neither the Romans nor the Jews killed Jesus,” Athanasius said suddenly, a thought striking him from out of the blue.
“Neither?” the bishop replied and looked at Dovilin in amusement at this unusual response. “Then who did?”
“Jesus chose to lay down his life for us all.”
Dovilin looked genuinely surprised, the bishop outraged. He didn’t like the answer, but apparently couldn’t refute or berate him for it either.
“Who taught you this?” he asked.
Athanasius didn’t really know. He couldn’t remember the particular passage from the Christian scriptures he had poured over back on the Pegasus before meeting John. But he had definitely picked up the subtext, and he now recalled something about their God whispering timely answers to Christians when questioned by Roman officials.
“The Holy Spirit,” he began and was cut off.
“The Holy Spirit?” the bishop said, incensed. “You are an uneducated, unwashed Jew from Malta, a potter who works clay.”
Athanasius could restrain himself no longer. This bishop was an absolute fraud and knew it. No wonder he didn’t want Christians quoting Scripture—he considered it a weapon to be used, not a revelation of truth. Athanasius knew the type well—the Roman augurs and oracles were full of Bishop Paul’s kind. The only way to deal with self-appointed gatekeepers of truth was to stick them with their own Holy Writ in front of other believers.
“We are all earthen vessels,” he replied. “God is the potter, we are the clay.”
Dovilin started to laugh, delighted to see his red-faced bishop at a loss for words. “I see your proud attitude has gotten you into trouble before, Ben-Deker. You should watch that mouth of yours,” he said good-naturedly. “Let’s see what you can do with your hands. I’ll have Brutus take you out to the winery.”
Athanasius nodded, and Cota appeared again. “I’m going out there now, Father. I can take Samuel.”
“Well, do it now before the winery closes for the evening, and have Gabrielle put him up for the night and then put him to work in the morning.”
“You really want to hand him off to that little whore, Father?” Cota asked. “I thought we could put him up out back with the First Fruits.”
Athanasius’s curiosity was peaked by Cota’s references of this “whore” and these “First Fruits,” but he wasn’t surprised by Dovilin’s firm reply, directly addressed to him.
“You may have a sterling introduction by my good friend Croesus, Ben-Deker,” Dovilin said. “But we operate by biblical principle on my vineyards. Every man starts from the ground up like our grapes. You will reap what you sow with your work, and we’ll see what kind of seed you really are.”
“Oh, thank you, sir. Thank you,” Athanasius said with as much sincerity as he could fake. “I will not let your kindness and generosity down.”
“See that you don’t, Ben-Deker, because nothing goes to waste here. Even the bad grapes are used to fertilize our fields. Bad for the wasted skins, good for our soil.”
* * *
The winery itself was on the other side of the vineyard from the Dovilin villa, separated by six hectares of grapes. As he and his escort Cota walked the gravel path between the house and the winery, Athanasius saw the spectacular two-story façade cut right into the rocks of the mountains. The façade, with its arches and inset frames for statues, was positively scenographic, just like the stage buildings behind the orchestra for his productions in the theaters.
“That is the winery ahead?” he asked, dumbfounded and not feigning it.
“Yes,” Cota told him. “Behind it is our stone wine cave where we store our finished product before distribution. Upstairs is the office. Our vineyard manager oversees the harvest, fermentation and field workers. My husband, whom you’ll meet, oversees sales and distribution.”
“How much wine do you produce each year?” he asked, doing his best to get some information out of her during this opportunity.
“Almost ten thousand amphorae per year.”
“Ten thousand!” he exclaimed. This was multiple times anything even the Palace of the Flavians could serve up in a year. “Who drinks it?”
She laughed. “You and me, of course. The bulk of our shipments go to the churches of Asia Minor for communion worship. My husband knows all the numbers, but I doubt he’ll share the particulars with you.”
Cota herself didn’t seem to be in any hurry to introduce him to her husband, and she asked him if there was anything in particular he wanted to see.
“I find it best to simply follow the wine,” he told her.
“Then follow me, Samuel.”
She led him to a great gravel courtyard outside the winery, where men from the fields brought baskets of grapes into one of the two cavernous cave entrances and dumped them into stone treading lagars dug out from the floor of the cavern. Here women were treading the sweet grapes with their feet.
“We call this first or sweet press,” Cota explained.
“The good stuff,” Athanasius quipped.
He watched the juice run off down wide troughs into drains that went into special basins for fermentation deeper into the cave. After the free juice poured off, the women stepped out of the treading lagars, which were now filled with the waste of the grapes called the pomace.
“Mind if I look closer?” he asked Cota.
“Not at all, but do be careful,” she cautioned, although he couldn’t imagine why.
He looked into a lagar that had been filled with red grapes. The pomace was blackish-red grape skins, stems and seeds, which contained most of the tannins and alcohol. The juice from this pomace was the brand bound for Caesar’s palace, he concluded, and then examined a lagar for white wine production. Here the debris was a pale, greenish-brown color, which contained more residual sugars.
“You must save the green stuff for some special dessert wines,” he started to say when the entire tunnel began to shake.
“Step away, Samuel!” Cota shouted, and pulled him back by his tunic as the ceiling seemed to cave in.
For a moment Athanasius thought the whole mountain was collapsing upon them. The rumble was deafening. With amazement Athanasius watched large flat boulders as wide and long as the two main lagars descend from the cavern cei
ling from large wooden capstans, pulleys and ropes. Then he saw how they defied gravity: teams of six men each were stationed at the spokes of two great horizontal turnstyles, pushing them in order to control the descent of the boulders until they pressed flat on the lagars. Suddenly a second burst of vast quantities of blood-red and pukish green pomace sprung forth from the lagars toward even larger fermentation pools beyond the first.
Cota laughed as Athanasius caught his breath. “We almost lost you, Samuel, and you haven’t even started yet!”
He nodded at the boulders. “You’ve got screw presses too. These are very rare.”
“So is that,” she said, and he realized she was looking at the Star of David with the Tear of Joy around his neck. She began to fondle it. It must have fallen out of his tunic when he had bent over the lagar. “Did a girl give you that?”
“It’s been in my family forever,” he replied and slipped it back under his tunic.
She looked relieved, then went on. “The cave provides the structure for the mechanisms. The free juice produces our highest-quality wine in the smallest quantities. But the screw press squeezes more juice and profits for good-quality wine in larger quantities. Now watch this, because this might be your job if my husband doesn’t like you.”
The boulders began to quake in the lagars again, and the men at the turnstyles were back at their positions, straining harder than ever to raise the stones like the mythological Sisyphus pushing his great boulder up the mountain only to see it roll back upon him. As soon as the boulders were back in place above the lagars, teams of scrawny young men, some mere boys, jumped into the lagars.
“Clear!” came the shout.
Supervisors pulled back planks that Athanasius hadn’t noticed before—they were stained by countless pomace grindings—to reveal holes at the bottom of the lagars. Then the scrawny sweepers began to push the remaining pomace down the holes.
Athanasius glanced at Cota and bent over the nearest lagar to look down one of the holes. Through it he saw the pomace dropping into vast pools of water in a cavern below.
“Fermentation pits for lora,” he said. “The bad stuff.”
“We make no bad wine, Samuel,” she sniffed. “We give the gift of wine to those who could otherwise not afford it.”
Athanasius now understood. Lora was an inferior wine that was normally given to slaves and common workers. It was simply a mix of leftover pomace and water. Disgusting stuff, recalling the one time he asked a servant to allow him a sip. It could hardly be called wine at all but some pretender that had no flavor.
“Let me guess,” Athanasius told Cota. “I’m looking at the Dovilin brand of communion wine down there. Water soaked in grape skins. That’s how you fill 10,000 amphorae.”
“I like it,” said a voice, and Athanasius turned to see big Brutus looking down at him with a frown.
Athanasius nodded. “My favorite,” he said, and winked at Cota. “I don’t know how the other half takes it so strong.”
“Mistress Cota,” Brutus said, “your father-in-law would like to see you later when you are finished with this one.”
“Well, I’m not,” she told him. “Not yet. But soon. I have to take him to Vibius. Go on.”
Athanasius watched the scowling slave leave and said, “I see Dovilin’s eyes are on everybody here.”
“This way,” she told him as another shift of men from the fields came in with fresh baskets for the presses and the entire process started over again. “One last stop at the Angel’s Vault.”
* * *
The Angel’s Vault turned out to be in the second of the two wine caves behind the winery’s façade in the cliffs, and Athanasius realized the two caves formed a V and connected at a guard station with three great vault doors and two armed guards. One door led back to the pits and presses from which they had come. The second door, according to Cota, would lead them to the Angel’s Vault and the commercial storefront of the winery.
“What about this one?” Athanasius asked her, pointing to the third door that opened into a particularly black, narrow and harrowing tunnel.
“That’s the hole to hell, Samuel. I do hope Vibius doesn’t send you down there.”
Athanasius followed Cota through the second tunnel that would lead them back outside through the main winery entrance. Here the walls were lined with amphorae, and Athanasius sensed immediately that this was what he was looking for in this entire mission to Cappadocia.
“They haven’t been sealed yet,” he observed.
“This is the final fermentation before we seal the wine,” she told him. “The freestanding amphorae you see are the reds, which we keep at higher temperatures in the cave. The amphorae that are half-buried are the whites, to keep them cooler.”
Athanasius immediately focused on the freestanding reds, scanning to see any markings or imperial insignias that would indicate they were bound for Caesar’s palace. “So decorative, with all kinds of marks and labels.”
“Master painters from the caves,” Cota told him, as if reciting a rehearsed line all the Dovilins were forced to repeat to buyers. “God speaks to many artisans down here.”
Athanasius nodded at the artwork that could be considered Christian to some, especially those involving fish and grain, shepherds and sheep. Then he caught a row of black vases in the Spartan style with red gladiators.
“These look imperial,” he said.
“They are,” she said, and looked this way and that quickly, her voice lowering to a conspiratorial whisper. “They say the wine in these amphorae pass through the lips of Caesar himself.”
“Impressive,” Athanasius said. “But risky. What happens if he doesn’t like it, or even falls ill?”
“We make sure that can never happen. That’s why the angels take their sip first.”
Athanasius started. “Angels?”
Cota nodded, as if sharing the secret of the ages behind the great Dovilin wines. “Something about the air in the amphora,” she said. “Too much of it and the wine turns to vinegar. Not enough and the wine is too bitter. So for the final fermentation we leave the amphora open just enough for the proper amount of air to escape. We like to say it is for the angels to take their sip of the spirits, their ‘angel’s cut.’ Then we seal the amphora shut with a special piece of cork and ceramic capping.”
“Like this one?” Athanasius asked, picking up the cork capper from an amphora to Cota’s dismay and sniffing it. “I see you use resin as a sealant. Smart. The resin preserves the wine once sealed and flavors it with the proper fermenation, provided you know what you’re doing. What is this indent on top of the cork with the Dovilin emblem?”
Cota took the cork from Athanasius and quickly placed it lopsided atop its amphora. “There is something in the resin,” she said. “Once the cork is sealed, it cannot be tampered with in any way, or the cork discolors. If it is not discolored, the palace staff then use a thin iron hook to pierce it and pull it out, and the wine is ready for serving.”
“So who applies the proper mix of resin?” he asked.
“The whore of hell,” she sniffed. “I think I hear her now.”
They moved on, but Athanasius made sure to remember the pattern and décor of the amphorae bound for Rome. It was here in this chamber, before the amphorae were sealed, where he would poison Domitian’s wine.
He tried to keep up with Cota, who breezed through the main wine cave just behind the face of the winery without explanation. Their tour, it seemed, was over. Along the way he noted similar patterns on the amphorae here as in the Angel’s Vault, and they seemed to have more markings for weight, price, destination and such.
He realized he might have to use these sealed amphorae as his key to identify those bound for Domitian, then go back and poison an identical and open amphora in the Angel’s Vault, then switch them. Simple but not easy, he suspected.
They had arrived outside in the courtyard below the towering façade as the Dovilin winery was closing up for the day. He n
oted the servants moving in and out of the cave, as well as security: almost a dozen ex-legionnaire types doing nothing much but standing around and looking tough.
“This way,” she said, tugging his hand. “The office is upstairs.”
They climbed a short flight of stone steps to the second story of the façade, where an open arch led into an impressive office with a table and fine furniture, but no husband.
“Vibius?” she called out.
Athanasius heard muffled voices. They seemed to be coming from behind the wall of shelves with scrolls, which Athanasius assumed to be commercial contracts and delivery schedules, sales receipts and records.
Cota cocked her ear, and her eyes narrowed. Her lips formed a thin, grim line, and she marched to the wall and pushed something that opened it to reveal another room behind it.
Now the voices were loud and clear—a young woman’s and a man’s, presumably Cota’s husband. There was a definite slap, then the girl’s voice cried out: “Stop it, Vibius. You know I am only trying to help the vineyard.”
Vibius said, “I will help the vineyard, and you will do what I want.”
“I know what you want, Vibius, and you’ll never get it with me.”
“You little whore,” he said. “You’ve given yourself to every rat in the streets. Now you want to get holy with me? I think not.”
“Vibius!” Cota screamed, and Athanasius followed her inside to see her husband threatening this girl with long dark hair, her hand at her face where it had been struck.
Vibius turned and looked at his wife and the stranger with rage. “What do you want?”
“This is Samuel Ben-Deker. Your father wants you to put him to work.”
Athanasius could feel Vibius’s stare. “Are you sure you haven’t already, Cota?”
“Vibius!” she screamed again, so that all inside and outside the winery could hear.
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