The Third Day

by David Epperson

  We climbed up and situated ourselves just below the peak, so our silhouettes could not be spotted from a distance. Being proper sentries, we sat with our backs to each other in complete silence. For a couple of hours, we heard nothing but the soft murmur of insects.

  I didn’t really expect trouble, and as the night wore on, I grew more confident that the combination of the Sabbath and the Passover would keep people from moving about.

  So I finally whispered to Sharon the question I had pondered throughout the day.

  “Last night, in Herod’s palace, how did you hold yourself together?”

  She didn’t immediately respond, and for a moment I thought I might have trodden on overly sensitive ground.

  “I’ll just say that I found your quick thinking extremely impressive – especially how you managed to let me know where they were holding you in a way that wouldn’t raise the king’s suspicions.”

  “Thank you,” she finally replied. “But to tell you the truth, I didn’t have any grand design. It just came to me, there on the spot. I had to do something.”

  That, I knew, was the way most heroes were made, despite what the storybooks said.

  “Well, however you concocted your scheme, that bow was a piece of work. Where on earth did you learn to do that?”

  She chuckled softly. “It’s called the Texas Dip. You were never a debutante, were you?”

  I admitted that the honor had eluded me.

  “But only because my gown wouldn’t fit properly on my big day.” I said.

  She laughed again. “Of course.”

  “Seriously, if you don’t mind me asking, how did you deal with the shame of being paraded through the palace naked like that? You had to have been scared.”

  She considered this for a moment.

  “I was terrified,” she finally said. “I thought I was done for; that I really was going to have to sleep with that pig.”

  “If it’s any comfort, he wasn’t the one with the worms,” I said.

  “I know; I finally remembered that was his nephew Agrippa. But I wasn’t thinking about worms. I was more concerned about the disappointment – that in my first real test, I would fail to stand up for my principles.”

  “Defying the king would have been suicide. Anything you would have done would have been under extreme duress.”

  “The other women didn’t see it that way. From what I could tell, they viewed their situation as a great opportunity.”

  “The first century’s version of the ‘casting couch,’ I suppose.”

  “Yes. I’ll never forget this one girl – she couldn’t have been older than seventeen – who spotted me as her primary rival from the first minute I arrived at the palace baths. In other circumstances, the situation would have been almost comical.”

  “So what kept you going? How did you manage to hold your head up so high?”

  “I wanted to live,” she replied. “I wanted to see my home again. I decided I’d do whatever I had to do to accomplish that.”

  But she sounded ashamed of herself for doing so.

  “Do you know how I justified it?” she asked.

  “In the Book of Esther, a young woman had to take part in a contest: whoever could screw the king’s brains out better than the others won the prize. Hers was the safety of her people. Mine – well, like I said, my goal was to stay alive one more day.”

  That wasn’t quite how I remembered the nuns telling the story, but that was the gist of it.

  “There’s no fault in that,” I said.

  “You didn’t see him this morning,” she replied. “The whole time they were mocking him, I cried. He wouldn’t have compromised.”

  “You did nothing wrong,” I repeated.

  “It wasn’t what I did, it’s what I had already made up my mind to do. I can thank you that in the end, I didn’t actually have to go through with it, but that doesn’t negate the choice I had already made inside.”

  “Well, if you’re going to thank anyone for getting you out of there, thank Naomi. And if anybody has cause for shame regarding his conduct last night, it’s me. In spite of all that duty, honor, and country stuff we talk about so much, I didn’t exactly sacrifice my life to save a damsel in distress.”

  “You wouldn’t have accomplished anything if you had.”

  “No, nor would you, had you refused the king.”

  She thought about this for a moment.

  “If you want to dwell on what you did, focus on your escape,” I reminded her. “Even some of my old Ranger colleagues would have struggled to pull that off. You should have seen the way Publius described how you got away; the look of admiration in his eyes. If it makes you feel any better, even Herod was impressed.”

  She smiled, though her pensive mood remained.

  “What’s going to become of us?” she finally asked.

  I knew what she meant; though I wanted to focus her mind on less troublesome topics for the moment.

  “I sincerely hope that within forty-eight hours, we will find ourselves seated comfortably behind the first-base dugout at Fenway Park,” I replied.

  This was true enough.

  She chuckled quietly, though I could tell that she wouldn’t let me dodge the question indefinitely. The trouble was; I had no answer, even if we survived – an outcome I still considered problematic at best.

  “I’m still working on that,” I said. “I think we all are.”

  “Whatever happens, it’s going to be hard to listen to those preachers,” she said. “From what I’ve seen, the ones who jabber the loudest about remaining steadfast in the face of great peril have never been in the remotest danger of encountering it themselves.”

  Except for those clowns on TV, that seemed a bit unfair, though I could sense where she was coming from.

  I told her that for six months, I had the ‘privilege’ of serving as a US Army liaison to Mobutu’s forces in Zaire. The missionaries I had encountered in that country easily surpassed me both in raw courage and in their ability to navigate through exceptionally challenging circumstances.

  “Did they bluster and pontificate?” she asked.

  They had not, which I took to be her point.

  “As they led me to Herod this morning, I thought back to a trip I had taken a few years ago,” she continued. “I had gone to Rome with my mother, in February, so we could see the sights before the hordes of summer tourists invaded the place.

  “One beautiful morning, we took our coffee into the Colosseum, and just sat there on the stone benches, reflecting on the early Christians and what they had to have been thinking as they were herded into that very arena, to be torn apart by wild animals.”

  I had done the same, years ago, and told her so.

  “I’m sure they had all heard the story of Daniel,” she said. “Yet he was saved and they were not. Why?”

  I had no answer.

  “And what about the ones who were burned alive? They had to have known of the men who were rescued from Nebuchadnezzar’s fiery furnace. Yet out of all the thousands, over the centuries, only three were saved. Three! The rest died screaming in agony, on the orders of the king, or the emperor.”

  Or the Pope, I didn’t add. That last part was an inconvenient fact I had been brought up to ignore.

  “These people had been just as faithful,” she exclaimed. “They had to be asking why; why God didn’t save them?”

  She started to cry softly. I turned and slid my arm around her, and felt her warmth.

  “It’s OK,” I said.

  She rested her head on my chest and squeezed tight.

  “I shouldn’t ask these questions, but I can’t make them go away. Can you believe it? There in the palace, I didn’t believe God would save me from Herod, even after I saw him.”

  My first thought was to ask what he looked like, just to divert her mind to another subject, but the time didn’t seem right.

  I also considered telling her that the Lord had sent his angels of mercy, in t
he unlikely form of a sympathetic Roman official and a clever, imaginative palace courtesan.

  But as I looked around, I couldn’t be sure of that, either. We weren’t yet out of the woods, and that same official, over the next couple of days, might be the very man charged with hunting us down.

  So I just wrapped her in my arms and spoke softly.

  “It will be OK,” I repeated. “God is complicated. I’m not sure we’re meant to understand everything.”

  Aside from an occasional glance around – after all we were still on guard duty – we just held onto each other and barely moved.

  Some time later, I heard rustling coming up the hill. By instinct, I reached for my gladius, though I needn’t have bothered. Our interlopers were only Lavon and Naomi, arriving to give us a break.

  “Relief shift,” he whispered.

  I told Sharon to pick a spot down with the others and that I’d join her in a few minutes. After she had disappeared around a tree, Lavon gestured in her direction.

  “I don’t think she’ll strive to chair the Emerald Charity Ball anymore,” he said.

  Apparently that was the pinnacle of Dallas high society, though from the way he described it, the event sounded more like a tax deductible fashion show than a boon to the poor and downtrodden.

  “No,” I replied. “I think her social-climbing days are over.”

  “Assuming we make it back in one piece, I don’t see D. Percival Throckmorton, III as long for her world either,” he said.

  I felt a knot tighten in my stomach. I had forgotten about D. Percival.

  On our trip to the lab in Tel Aviv, Lavon had described him as a scion of Old Money Dallas, whose “job,” from what he could tell, consisted of being wined and dined by his pals at the toxic, crony-ridden cesspools we otherwise recognize as the big Wall Street banks.

  The archaeologist must have noticed my strain, though I hoped he couldn’t read my true thoughts.

  “What about you?” I asked, more to change the subject than to gather information.

  “I’m struggling through some things myself,” he said. “Assuming we make it back, the world’s going to be different for us all.”

  Of that, I was certain. I simply had no idea how.

  Chapter 62

  The rest of the night passed uneventfully. Markowitz returned to our shelter at dawn to wake the rest of us, after which he trudged back up the hill to resume his duties alongside the Professor at our makeshift observation post.

  Once we had light enough to see, we discovered a small pool of water tucked away in an isolated corner of our rocky lair – a remnant from yesterday’s showers – though food remained an issue.

  Lavon gave us a brief moment of hope in that regard.

  As we had observed at the village coming in, ancient harvesting practices were remarkably inefficient. Furthermore, Mosaic Law allowed the reapers only one pass at each field. After that, the poor had the right to come in and glean anything that remained.

  Since the barley harvest had just concluded, this sounded promising, although Naomi quickly discovered that any fields within striking distance of the main road had already been picked clean.

  “Worth a try, anyway,” Lavon said as she returned.

  She offered to venture farther out, but none of us wanted to take the chance that we could become separated.

  I briefly considered slipping out and trying to nab a stray goat, but Lavon vetoed this as well. We had enough trouble as it was without bringing a posse of angry shepherds down upon our heads.

  “We’ll just have to put aside thoughts of food,” he said.

  In an effort to divert our minds, the four of us crept up to the crest of the ridge overlooking our shelter. In the distance, we could see a couple of boys driving a small flock of lambs, but otherwise all remained quiet. The denizens of Jerusalem took the Sabbath very seriously indeed.

  “I wonder how voluntary this is?” I asked.

  Lavon didn’t know, nor could he ascertain from Naomi the degree to which compliance was underpinned by an organized body of religious enforcers, like the Saudi mutaween or the Iranian basij.

  “Given her situation, she has no interest in the topic, one way or the other,” he explained.

  ***

  In truth, the enforcement of the Sabbath wasn’t our most pressing issue, either.

  I glanced back to the opposite side of the ravine to verify that Bryson and Markowitz remained at their posts and then directed the others to return to our shelter.

  “What’s our plan now?” I asked after we had found a comfortable spot in the shade.

  They agreed that we had a choice to make.

  At that moment, we still had an opportunity to flee to the coast. But the window would close quickly, and when it did – and if the transport apparatus remained inoperative past Sunday – our odds of survival would dwindle to zero.

  “It’s that simple,” said Lavon.

  None of us argued; but none of us got up to make a run for it, either. The truth was: we all wanted to know, and I had become as fixated on the topic as the others. We had come too close to do anything else.

  Working in our favor, Naomi still believed that the palace commanders would wait until mid-morning before sending out other guards to make inquiry.

  Furthermore, these men would sally forth with the expectation of finding their comrades resting under a shade tree, sated and drunk, using the Sabbath as an excuse for their inactivity. At least initially, they would be in no hurry.

  I did some mental arithmetic and felt even better.

  Even if Herod’s relief party found their comrades’ bodies quickly, they would need time to get back to the palace on foot. If Lavon’s hypothesis was correct, Herod, like the Temple authorities, would then have to obtain clearance from Pilate to assemble a larger armed force.

  None of this would happen immediately, and with luck, an intensive search for our whereabouts wouldn’t begin in earnest until the following day.

  “Of course,” Lavon explained, “the downside is that the Romans might feel compelled to join in the hunt, if for no other reason than to save face. That will change everything.”

  I had to concur. While Naomi’s tricks had worked on Herod’s men, I had no doubt that once Roman professionals set out to track us down, we’d never stand a chance.

  But the question still remained: when?

  “What is our window to retrieve the camera?” I asked. “I read somewhere that the Resurrection accounts all differ in their chronology.”

  Lavon conceded that the Gospels varied in their particulars, such as the number of women who first ventured out to the tomb, whether they saw one angel or two, or the names of the disciples who ran back to the grave site to investigate the women’s tale.

  “But the timing is consistent,” he explained. “The women showed up at the tomb with their spices at the crack of dawn, more or less. Once there, they saw that someone had rolled the stone away and that the body was missing.

  “Although the Gospels differed as to the exact sequence of what happened next, they all agreed that shortly thereafter, the women hurried back into the city to inform the others.”

  “How long would this take?” I asked.

  Lavon glanced up at the sky and conversed briefly with Naomi.

  “We don’t know exactly where in Jerusalem they were coming from,” he said, “but I’d guess it took at least half an hour to get back to their hiding place; maybe more. They would have wanted to make sure they weren’t followed, so they probably didn’t take the shortest route.”

  “Once they returned, the disciples didn’t believe the story,” Sharon added.

  “That’s right,” said Lavon. “Luke says they ‘considered it nonsense,’ and we all know about Thomas. I’m sure they argued a while before a few of them finally decided to check things out for themselves.”

  “So we have at least another half hour, then, to retrieve the camera and make ourselves scarce before anyone com
es back?” I said.

  Lavon nodded. “Probably an hour; perhaps even two. Remember, the disciples feared they were still being hunted. Pilate may have decided to take the ‘strike the shepherd and the sheep will scatter’ approach, but the remaining eleven didn’t know this at the time.”

  “Didn’t they run; run to the tomb, I mean?” asked Sharon.

  “Yes, but the Gospels don’t say exactly when they started. Running men would have drawn attention, so my own thought is that they tried to keep a low profile until they got safely outside the city walls.”

  “What about the guards?” I asked.

  “Matthew is the only one of the four Gospels to mention them, and he only says that they went back into the city along with the women. Unfortunately, we don’t have any more details.”

  “Any idea how many there will be?”

  “More than one. That’s all I can say.”

  ***

  Now that we had a plan, we spent the rest of the day watching and waiting – which in many respects is the hardest task of all.

  For his part, Bryson paced back and forth all afternoon as he rehashed a litany of potential technical disasters.

  “What if the recording fails?” he muttered.

  “What if the battery runs out?”

  “What if I’ve set the timer wrong?”

  “What if the low light compensator doesn’t work?”

  “What if – ”

  Though I could understand his concerns, after a little while, I had had enough.

  “Calm down, Professor,” I said. “Please.”

  Then I laughed. “You’re scaring the others.”

  In truth, though, even I felt the butterflies; and in my famished, sleep-deprived state, I failed to grasp the implications of what Bryson had been saying.

  Chapter 63

  As we had the previous night, we agreed to divide guard duty into shifts; only this time, Bryson insisted on taking the last watch.

  Since I wasn’t entirely convinced that he wouldn’t retrieve the camera and abandon the rest of us to our fates, I told the others I’d join the Professor on the late shift. Except for one small oversight, this would have been a fine plan.