“Christians get no such privilege,” Helius said. “They are treasonous, and Caesar has made very plain the consequences for those who will not worship him.”
Hezron snorted. “If that is your accusation, let me bring forth the witnesses who will attest otherwise. I am a rabbi, well-known for my teachings against the Christians.”
“What about your daughter? Will witnesses clear her of the accusation too?”
Hezron drew an indignant breath, then released it slowly, as if finally understanding the sudden and unexplained arrest by soldiers.
He turned to Leah. “You? You too?” His voice was broken of the strength it had just contained.
Tears began to stream down Leah’s face at his obvious pain. She ached for her father to reach out and touch her face, to wipe her tears as he had done all her life.
Hands at his sides, he spoke. “It is true, isn’t it? You are a follower.”
Before she could utter the words that she feared might kill him, Chayim interrupted, speaking to Helius. “The charges are irrelevant. I’ve arranged for you to receive the amount agreed for you to release them. You said nothing about bringing them here. Or bringing me here, for that matter.”
“Things have changed,” Helius said, still staring at Leah and Hezron. “This was before I found out who the old man was.”
Hezron moved his gaze from Leah to Helius, who continued to speak.
“I began to wonder why anyone would pay such a large ransom to release you from the arena, so I made inquiries,” Helius said. “I discovered you are a great rabbi. Which is very convenient. I need your help interpreting a letter written by a Jew. Once you have done that for me, I will release you and your daughter.”
“Give me the letter now so that I can be done with it,” Hezron answered. Strength seemed to return to him, as if he’d made a decision. “I will do anything to save my daughter, no matter what faith she follows.”
Hezron lifted a hand and gently touched Leah’s cheek. He brushed away a tear, and she knew that he was giving her a silent message of love and acceptance.
“You will be provided the letter and a place to work,” Helius said. “See to it that you understand the letter well enough to explain everything in it to me.”
“This was not what we agreed!” Chayim said.
“Silence,” Helius said calmly. “Before I have your tongue removed.”
Chayim looked across at Leah. Their eyes met briefly. Then she dropped her head, torn with emotion.
One man, a man she might be able to love, had taken great risk to rescue her by bribing Helius. The other man, her father, had been put at great risk because of her and was still willing to rescue her at any cost. She felt as if she’d been placed between them, and she could find no words.
The tension was broken by the appearance of a large man stepping through the archway of the courtyard. He had a well-scarred face and a savage smile. He carried a sack in one hand. Tigellinus, prefect of the emperor’s soldiers.
Gaius Ofonius Tigellinus had become friends with Nero when Nero was still a teenager, and had always encouraged Nero’s excesses. It was Tigellinus who had revived the hated treason courts, and Nero used this new power with ruthlessness, taking property and life with mere accusations.
Tigellinus caught Helius’s eye and lifted the sack high, as if it were significant.
“Go now,” Helius immediately told Leah, Hezron, and Chayim. He waved at the slaves standing at the far side of the courtyard. “These slaves will ensure each of you is placed under guard in separate quarters.”
“Me!” Chayim said. “You have no right to do this to me. Not after what I’ve paid for this.”
“Of course I do,” Helius said. He turned his attention to Tigellinus, who was nearing them. Red liquid seeped from the seams of the sack.
“If you want to make an issue of this,” Helius told Chayim, “we could always have Tigellinus here add your head to the one he carries now.”
Vitas was tempted to let himself fall back into unconsciousness. The swaying of the ship would make it very easy. But he needed to find the scroll!
Before Vitas could rise, however, he sensed, rather than felt, a presence beside him.
“Drink,” a soft voice said. “Your body needs it after your fever.”
A hand cradled the back of his head and helped him sit completely upright. It hurt Vitas to turn his head sideways.
The man helping him was dressed in a simple tunic, a covering that left only his arms exposed, showing corded muscle. Vitas guessed him to be in his fifties, but he could have been older, for his face showed no softness that came with easy living. His hair matched his beard—gray hairs far outnumbering the remainder of black.
Vitas knew this man. He was a Jew. He’d been on the same riverboat from Rome to Ostia and had introduced himself as John, son of Zebedee.
Vitas groaned. Not from recognition but from renewed hopelessness. Both had been placed on this ship as prisoners; neither had known why or where the ship was headed.
Would the scroll have answers to these questions too?
John responded to the groan by lifting a ladle of water and helping Vitas drink.
“How long?” Vitas said after gulping the water.
“Your fever?”
Vitas nodded.
“The first night,” John said. “All of yesterday. And last night.”
Vitas blinked. A full day and a half on the water. A full day and a half of travel from Rome. From Sophia.
“Do you know why we are here?” Vitas asked.
The older man smiled. “The will of God.”
“Our destination?” Vitas asked, impatient with the man’s vague answer. Regardless of what the scroll might tell him, Vitas needed to get back to Rome. To find Sophia. “Did you find out from any of the crew?”
“Alexandria.”
“Alexandria!”
Vitas was not a naval man, but he knew the route to grain ports of Alexandria. Depending on winds, the ship would reach the Straits of Messana on the third or fourth day. He could leave the ship when it stopped there.
Vitas lurched, trying to get to his feet. He was first and foremost a man of action. He’d find the magister and convince him that he needed to get off the ship at the first port.
The sudden effort was too taxing. A wave of nausea knocked Vitas to his knees. Then came the convulsions of his stomach. He’d eaten so little in the past hours that he was only capable of dry retching.
John had a damp cloth and gently wiped Vitas’s face.
It was an odd sensation for Vitas, to be cared for as if he were a child. More fragments of memory returned. Vitas had not been alone during the fever. He’d woken occasionally, dimly aware of that same damp cloth during the worst of it.
“That was you,” Vitas said. He struggled again to his feet. “The blanket. Lifting me onto the deck. With me all through the fever.”
John nodded.
Vitas wanted to ask if John knew anything about the scroll, but caution tempered him. Perhaps what was inside the scroll was too valuable to let anyone know of it. Vitas, after all, had no reason to trust this Jew. The man was a stranger to him; all Vitas knew was that the Jew had defied Nero and had once been exiled for it.
Vitas tried a step and nearly fell.
John reached to steady him, but Vitas pushed away his hand. “Enough. I am well now.”
The gray-haired man appeared to take no offense. “Of course.”
Vitas moved a step past him. The search for the scroll could wait. First, he needed to find the captain.
Vitas glanced around the deck. The ship was a corbita, a common merchant ship. Over a hundred feet long, if the ship was going to Alexandria, it would be carrying exports from Rome. In Alexandria, it would pick up grain for its return. But perhaps not for months. Too soon the winter winds would stop all travel back across the Mediterranean.
Vitas could not wait months. He knew the commander of the legion stationed in Sicil
y. News of events in Rome would not have reached Sicily yet, and Vitas could plead his case to the commander. Sicily was far enough from Rome to be safe, yet close enough that he could return to Rome within days, not weeks or months.
Vitas surveyed the crew, searching unsuccessfully for the captain. There were a dozen crew members in sight, engaged in the various activities necessary for sailing a ship this size. Vitas had spent months on similar ships, transporting his soldiers to Britannia and back to Italy, so the activities were familiar to him.
There was the gubernator—the pilot—guiding the ship with the tiller bar that controlled the enormous steering bars on each quarter. A couple of crewmen were adjusting the lines of the huge square rig, the mainsail. Another couple worked the foresail. Several more were engaged in the tedious, unending task of bailing buckets of bilge water up from the hold. At the far end, the ship’s carpenter and two assistants moved two heavy beams of lumber. Beside the carpenter, on the floor of the deck, was a large triangular frame of wood, with tools scattered beside it. It looked as if the carpenter had set aside that task to move the beams.
Vitas frowned.
No passengers.
Without fail, merchant ships carried passengers and their servants, men and women who would spend idle time in card games, dice, or commenting on the crew around them. A ship this size could be expected to have dozens of passengers.
None.
Vitas knew from experience that passengers would not be hidden below decks. The only quarters there belonged to the captain. They’d be on the deck, in or near tents that their servants pitched and maintained for them.
No passengers.
He frowned again, looking more closely at the carpenter and his assistants. It appeared to Vitas that they were lashing together the two beams, forming the shape of a cross.
This was confirmed moments later when all three men strained to set the cross upright. They leaned it against the spar of the mainsail. All the rest of the crew stopped work. The exchanged glances among them were obvious.
And chilling.
“As a Jew, I’m sure you are aware of the Roman method of ruling the provinces,” Damian told his captive in the hillside olive grove.
Damian sat on the edge of the lower half of the olive press, his feet dangling just above the ground. This half was a huge horizontal disk of stone, flat on the ground, like a wheel on its side. It was fully three paces in diameter, and the top surface was the height of a man’s waist. A wide and shallow trough had been carved between the center of the disk and its outer edge, going the entire circumference of the disk. This wide groove was filled with freshly harvested olives.
“Caesar grants privileges and citizenship to those who cooperate,” Damian continued, “and ruthlessly destroys those who do not.”
The bound wrists of Damian’s captive were tied to an upright axle in the center of the olive press. His arms were stretched across the trough of the press, just above the olives that filled it. The rest of his body hung down over the edge of the press, and he stood awkwardly, his belly pressing into the stone.
“You may recall my first words to you,” Damian said. “I invited you to eat and drink. I promised to give you comfort in exchange for answers.” Damian shrugged. “You should not be surprised, then, that when you refused to speak, your food and drink were removed. That, however, is only the beginning of what you face for refusing to cooperate.”
Damian pushed himself off the edge of the olive press. He felt his hatred for Nero and Helius coiling in his belly, and he used it to lash out at this prisoner. Damian needed the hate—he was not capable of torture without it.
Damian spoke to the giant slave who had been standing silently to the side. “Let’s show him what we have in mind.”
A half hour earlier, Damian had instructed other slaves to deliver several wooden beams to be left near the press. These beams were the height of a man and the thickness of Damian’s arm.
Damian picked up the end of one beam. Because of the fierceness of his hangover, his vision seemed to explode in small dots as blood rushed to his head. He fought the urge to vomit again and pretended nonchalance as he laid the beam across the olive press, several feet down from the captive’s arms and parallel to them.
This beam now rested halfway between the captive’s arms and the upper portion of the olive press, which was a second disk of stone that sat upright and fit snugly within the shallow walls of the trough of the lower disk. Like a wheel too, it had a wooden axle protruding horizontally, with a ring at the end that fit over the vertical axle in the center. This heavy wheel of stone was designed with the protruding horizontal axle to be pushed by three men walking around the outer edge of the olive press, so that the disk could be rolled continuously within the trough of the lower disk, its tremendous weight squeezing oil from olives that drained from the trough into a catch basin.
“Begin,” Damian said, holding the outer end of the beam. He’d instructed Jerome on what to do next.
Jerome moved to the axle of the upper disk and grabbed it with both hands in front of his chest. He set his weight against the axle. His head was shaved, and the layers of muscle between the bottom of his skull and the top of his neck bulged as he leaned into the axle.
Although it normally took three men to move the stone disk, Jerome shoved it forward with little sign of strain. Olives in front of the round upright stone disappeared beneath it, becoming pulp as the disk passed over. Two steps later, moving around the outside of the lower disk, Jerome reached Damian and stopped with the upper disk resting against the beam across the trough.
Jerome paused.
Damian looked at the captive farther down, whose eyes were fixed on the beam. Damian nodded. “Jerome.”
Jerome pushed the upper wheel forward another step as Damian held the beam in place so that it would not slip. The disk rolled over it, snapping it like kindling.
“I believe the sound of your arm breaking would not be much different than that. If we could hear it over your screams.” Damian grabbed another beam and laid it across the olive press a few feet closer to the captive, allowing Jerome to roll the disk over it, too, with the same splintering results. “To refresh your memory, I am a slave hunter. A man of great power has hired me to capture you. But before I deliver you to him, I want to know more about your vision, the one that is in a letter circulating among followers of the Christos.”
After all, if this was something Helius wanted badly, it would have value for Damian.
“Talk to me about your vision,” Damian continued.
He watched the face of the captive closely. A muscle twitched along the man’s jaw. But there was no other sign that the captive would respond.
“Jerome,” Damian said, “this man needs more persuasion.”
The giant slave began pushing again, until the massive wheel touched the captive’s nearest arm. A quarter turn more and his arm would be pulverized.
Damian spoke to the captive in a conversational tone. “Perhaps now you’ll answer my questions?”
“Well?” Helius demanded of Tigellinus as soon as they were alone in the courtyard. “Whose head is it?”
“I don’t like your tone,” Tigellinus said casually and just as casually placed a hand on Helius’s shoulder. “I searched among the bodies myself because I recognized the need for secrecy. But it doesn’t mean you can speak to me like I’m one of your slaves.”
Tigellinus smiled as he spoke but squeezed hard with his powerful fingers, digging into the meat of Helius’s shoulder.
After all their years together in close service to Nero, Tigellinus had a rough affection for Helius. Tigellinus was brawn to Helius’s elegance, crudeness to his effeminacy. As a devious man himself, Tigellinus admired Helius for the same quality. Yet Tigellinus knew that Helius would seize on the first sign of weakness, and he was ever vigilant to squash any signs of imperiousness.
Like now.
“You do want to apologize, don’t you?” Tigel
linus said, smile still in place.
“Of course,” Helius said, his grimace plain. “I forgot myself simply because of my distress at this situation.”
Tigellinus eased the pressure and stepped back.
“Was it Vitas?” Helius asked more respectfully.
“See for yourself.” Tigellinus hid a grin as he lifted the sack and extended it to Helius.
Tigellinus was aware of Helius’s squeamishness, aware that Helius had flicked a glance at his blood-crusted fingernails and swallowed back revulsion. But, because they were always involved in a subtle power struggle, Tigellinus enjoyed the chance to expose weakness in Helius. A true Roman like Tigellinus had no compunctions about the blood that flowed when hacking apart another man’s body.
“That’s not necessary,” Helius said. “I’ve done my part.”
“By sending me at dawn into the pile of bodies outside the arena?”
“You agreed with me,” Helius insisted. “Vitas was a soldier. He would not have strapped the shield on his right arm.”
Tigellinus nodded at that. Soldiers—even left-handed soldiers—were trained to handle a sword with their right hand and strap the shield to the left arm. This way, an entire line of soldiers, each guarding the next, presented an unbroken row of shields to the enemy. It was inconceivable that Vitas would have fought the retiarius with a sword in his left hand. And that could only mean something else just as inconceivable: it had not been Vitas in the arena, but a left-handed man unfamiliar with military training.
“As you promised, the face was bruised badly, almost beyond recognition,” Tigellinus said. “That’s how I was able to identify the body.”
“Does the head belong to Vitas?”
“Check the teeth first,” Tigellinus said, holding the sack open and peering inside. “Vitas came from wealth. You’d expect the teeth to show that. And you’ll also see that without blood to fill the bruises, the bone structure of the face gives a semblance of recognition.”
“Please!” Helius stamped his foot, much to the enjoyment of Tigellinus. “You’ve already seen the head. Why do I need to do so?”
The Last Sacrifice Page 4