Ben-Hur

by Carol Wallace

  It was perpetual night in those cells. Somehow the prisoners had been supplied with food and water. Another breakdown in the organization; how could that have gone unnoticed? But a breakdown to be glad of. Several times already cell doors had opened onto nothing but skeletons clothed in leathery scraps of skin. Disgraceful! Rome was stern, the warden thought, but she was not supposed to be vicious.

  PONTIUS PILATE

  As the governor of Judea, Pontius Pilate was in control of all the Roman occupation forces, as well as the Temple and its funds. And he sometimes abused his authority. He appropriated Temple funds to construct a thirty-five-mile aqueduct for Jerusalem, provoking a major protest. In response, Pilate ordered soldiers to infiltrate the crowds in disguise and beat the offenders to death. Another time, he murdered some Galileans as they offered sacrifices at the Temple. Pilate also tried to bring images of Caesar into Jerusalem for worship.

  In AD 36, Pilate was dismissed from his position as governor after he slaughtered pilgrims who followed a Samaritan false prophet.

  Valerius Gratus, though, had not been a model Roman. On the lowest level of the dungeon the warden and his appalled subordinates found prisoners whose tongues had been cut out. Or who had been blinded. Or both. The warden was already wondering how to restore these pathetic men to their families—which had been Pilate’s promise. He was halfway up the stairs, carrying his own torch, when one of the jailers called him back. “He won’t leave,” the jailer said, pointing to what looked like an animated skeleton. There were noises coming from him—somewhere behind the hair and beard matted over his face. He pointed back into his cell, beckoning. “He wants us to come in. Must want to show us something.”

  “Does he understand?” asked the warden. “He understands we’re freeing him?”

  “Yes. But he keeps dragging us back. It must be important.”

  “I’m afraid I agree with you,” said the warden.

  It was the wrong time for the noises. To the extent that they could tell time, anyway. It was always hard and getting harder. But surely the plate had been pushed through the slot just a few hours earlier?

  As if hours meant anything.

  Still, it was a change. To hear noise from the hatch.

  Then came the strangest thing. Even afterward, Tirzah always remembered the deep shock.

  Light. A golden—where had that word come from?—glow. On the floor. Through the hatch.

  “Mother!” she hissed.

  Her mother had not spoken in a while, but Tirzah had heard her moving. Gently, with the utmost care. Just brushing the back of a hand along the floor. Because the fingers . . .

  She heard a rustle. Then a whisper from nearby. Close to the floor. “What is it?”

  The glow withdrew. “Hello?” a voice replaced it. A voice! The voice of a man! A healthy, robust man! “Is anyone in there?”

  Tirzah felt herself pushed. Her mother, urging her forward. She crept close to the hatch. “Yes,” she said. Or tried to. It was a croak. “Yes!” she repeated. “Two of us.”

  “Who are you?”

  “Women of Israel. Who are you?”

  “Roman officials. Here to release you.”

  “Praise be to God,” Tirzah heard her mother breathe. “Water?”

  “Water?” Tirzah whispered.

  “Yes, of course,” the male voice answered. “Right away. Just . . .”

  “The light?” she asked. “Leave it?”

  “Yes. Yes.” The glow returned.

  She backed away from it. Light! It . . . it showed things! A semicircle on the floor by the hatch, polished as smooth as marble. By them, she supposed. By her mother and her in all the time they had been here. The plate. Wooden. Plain. She looked away. Her eyes were already tired. The rest of the cell looked darker now. She could not see her mother.

  “Where are you?” she whispered.

  “Here.” Outside the glow, a flicker of movement.

  “Mother . . .” She crept over. “Mother! Is this . . . ? It is real, isn’t it?”

  The glow vanished. “Water,” said the voice. “Coming through. And food, too. But where is the door?”

  The familiar sound: a pan of water coming through the hatch. Followed by a plate.

  Naomi pulled herself over to the hatch. “Thank you,” she whispered.

  “What was that? I didn’t hear you.”

  “Thank you,” she repeated as loudly as she could. “There is no door.”

  “Ye gods,” the voice said, withdrawing from the slot. The light came back, showing the water. And on the plate . . .

  “Grapes! Mother, grapes!”

  “Gently,” warned Naomi. “One. It’s been so long . . .”

  “I know.”

  They each ate a grape, slowly. Drank some water. Outside, tapping. Hammers, perhaps.

  “Another one?” Tirzah asked.

  “I think so.” They each ate another grape.

  A pebble fell at the back of the cell. Where they slept. Long ago they had called it the bedroom, in an effort to keep up their spirits. A little shower of rubble followed it.

  Tirzah lay down, suddenly exhausted. She closed her eyes and laid her hands over them to keep out the light. Then took them off, rolling her head toward the hatch. To make sure the light was still there.

  It took hours. There had originally been a door, but it had been filled with stones and mortar. Hurriedly, the workmen told the warden. A number of years ago—but not fifty. Less than ten. There were prisoners in there? Women? Have to go slowly, then. What if they were buried in a shower of rubble?

  The warden stayed. He didn’t feel he could leave them, somehow. Though he had a feeling the shower of rubble might be the easiest solution. Whatever story these women had to tell, it was not going to look good for Rome.

  They were very quiet. He kept thinking about the one who had thanked him. Thanked him! For a pan of water and some grapes.

  Finally a hole was pierced at the top of the doorway. “Look!” Tirzah whispered, but her mother didn’t answer. Could she be sleeping? More light seeped in through the hole. The room was taller than Tirzah had thought.

  After that it went faster. The workmen found the shape of an opening. The stones and mortar were swept outward, into the corridor. Light began drifting downward into the cell.

  At last the warden had to speak to them again. He took the torch from the slot. “Stay away from the wall. Stones are still falling. We should be through soon, though. Would you like more water?”

  “No,” Tirzah answered. “But . . . blankets? Our clothes . . . We have no clothes.” She heard the rustle as he withdrew and orders given to someone outside.

  “Blankets. Or cloaks—what you can find,” he said to the jailers. “They’ll be weak.”

  “What are we going to do with them?” the senior jailer asked.

  “I won’t know until I see them,” the warden answered. “Find them a clean cell, up the stairs, with a window and a big bucket. The smell . . . We can’t just send them outside like this. They’ll need to be cleaned up. Probably fed. Maybe for a few days. Send physicians to them. Find out why they were here. And only then, try to find their family.”

  “A woman of Israel, she called herself,” said the jailer. “Sounded educated. When they are released, it’s going to be trouble.”

  “For Valerius Gratus, not for Pilate. Pilate will get the credit for releasing them.”

  “Ho, we’re through!” shouted one of the workmen. “You need to . . .” Then with a clatter, he dropped his tools. In the flickering torchlight the warden saw him stumble backward across the pile of rubble. Eyes wide, he turned to the warden. “They’re lepers!” he cried out and raced for the stairs.

  The Antonia Tower, or Antonia Fortress, was built by Herod the Great near the Temple Mount.

  “Unclean,” came the thread of a voice through the doorway. “Unclean, unclean!”

  In spite of himself, the warden stepped over to look and was instantly sorry he had.
He knew he would remember the sight forever.

  He had never seen lepers up close. Well, one didn’t. A touch was enough to spread the disease—and what a horrible one. The skin seemed to devour itself, people said. Fingers dropped off, and noses. Eyelids shrank or split or disappeared. Some lepers were blind. Most had strange, high, scratchy voices—like the women in the cell. Eventually their inner organs would harden and cease to function. It was a slow, living death. And the women in the cell were more than halfway to being corpses.

  The blessing was the hair. Theirs had grown and grown. Coarse and crinkled and a strange yellow-white but long enough to hide . . . a lot. They had turned their backs but still, their feet were barely human. One of them reached around to pull her hair closer, but it was almost a claw that he saw. Not by any means a hand.

  “Unclean,” one of them said again. “Touch nothing in the cell. Not the floor or the wall. And make sure anything we have touched is burned.”

  The warden stepped away from the cell. “I am beyond reach,” he said. “But I must know who you are and why you are here. If you are strong enough to tell me.”

  The hoarser one spoke up. He wished it had been the other—she was easier to understand. But this one, evidently, was the elder. “I am the widow of Prince Ithamar of the house of Hur, of this city. He was a man of business, friendly with the Romans here and even with Caesar. This is my daughter. We do not know why we are here. Why not ask Valerius Gratus? It was on the day of his arrival that we were taken from our home.”

  “We do not know how long we have been here,” added the daughter.

  “Gratus is no longer procurator,” said the warden. “It is his successor, Pontius Pilate, who chose to look into the prisons of Judea.”

  “Then blessings be on his name,” said the young one.

  “I will have clothes and water brought to you. Water to wash, as well. But I can do nothing else. We will have you taken to the gate of the tower and set free tonight. Could you eat some more?”

  “Yes, perhaps. But may I ask one question, since you seem to be a kind man? Have you heard anything in Jerusalem about my son? On the same day, he was taken off by a cohort of soldiers. Is there a chance that he might be in one of the cells? Perhaps you have even freed him today?”

  He could barely hear her last words, they were so quiet. It was a moment before he could formulate an answer. “I am sorry,” he said. “I have not come across a prisoner—you say the name is Hur?” The white-haired head nodded. “I have seen all of the lists. That name was not on them.”

  The news seemed to hit her like a blow, for she crumpled against her daughter. There was something grotesque about the gesture of affection and tenderness with which the daughter gently guided her mother to the floor. “Thank you,” said the daughter. “It’s hard news. But I’m sure it’s better to know than to wonder.”

  The warden did as he had promised—lavishly, in fact. Gowns, veils, sandals—could they even wear sandals on those feet? he wondered—were found and bundled up for the women, two sets of everything for each. A basket was filled with bread and dried fruit along with a flask of water. How would they live? From one day to the next, he supposed, until death came to claim them.

  CHAPTER 38

  FREE

  The massive gate of the Antonia Tower creaked to a close behind them with a final echoing bang. They stood in the shadow of the walls, clutching each other’s hands. Tirzah felt she should carry the basket, but the fingers of her right hand were mere stubs, so Naomi held it.

  ACTORS WHO HAVE PORTRAYED JUDAH’S MOTHER

  Claire McDowell—1925 (Princess of Hur)

  Martha Scott—1959 (Miriam)

  Tabitha St. Germain—2003 (Miriam)

  Alex Kingston—2010 (Ruth)

  Ayelet Zurer—2016 (Naomi)

  Everything was strange. The robe felt rough against her skin, the sandals against her feet. Her hair was noisy, hissing and crackling around her ears. The very air swooped around like a live thing, bringing scents and sounds she couldn’t identify.

  She did not dare look at her mother. It was bad enough to see, in the cold moonlight, the skin of her own wrists, covered with either thick silvery scales or, worse, oozing red welts. Her feet were the same, except that the welts bled in places. She knew that was not the worst, though. She would never again look into a pool of water to admire herself; she was sure of that. Whatever she looked like, it provoked horror. Everyone who had seen her in the hours since their release had flinched and gasped. She knew there was something wrong with her eyes; they didn’t seem to close completely. And her mouth. She could have lifted her good fingers to touch it, but they had little feeling and she didn’t think she wanted to know. She was afraid her lips might be gone.

  They stood there trembling for several long minutes, waiting to feel strong enough to move. At last Naomi said, “We cannot stay here.”

  “No,” Tirzah answered in a whisper.

  “We must be gone from the city by daybreak.”

  “I know.” Tirzah paused. “I am not very strong.”

  “No. Nor I. So we will go now. And stay in the shadows. Pull up your veil.”

  They set out. It was a quiet night—the guard had intentionally kept them indoors until after midnight, when the city watch had changed. They were so frail that he could not imagine them reaching their destination. And once there, how would they live? Would they have to beg, just to get food? Trail around the streets of Jerusalem, holding out a basket for small coins? Who would come close enough to give them anything? They would starve.

  Or die of their disease. They would die, anyway.

  It was slow progress for the two women. They crept along walls, leaning against them often; their ruined feet robbed them of balance. The streets were empty, though lights shone high in the Antonia Tower. Tirzah thought about commenting on this. She drew breath, but it was just too much effort.

  “Do you know where we are?” Naomi whispered.

  Tirzah didn’t know. As a girl she had rarely left her home and certainly never alone. She had never learned the streets of the city.

  “Look.” Her mother pointed around a corner. There was a long wall with a tile roof. A palm tree indicated a courtyard. A smaller structure stood above the wall. . . .

  Tirzah gasped. “Home?”

  “It was our home,” Naomi answered. “We must pass it on our way.”

  Tirzah stood still, gazing upward at the summerhouse. “Are we on the street where it happened?”

  No need to explain what she meant. “Yes,” her mother said. “We will walk past the very spot.”

  “Then let us do that,” Tirzah said. “I will take the basket for a while.”

  It took them long minutes to stumble even the short distance to the corner of the old Hur palace. Once there, Naomi looked upward. The full moon spread silver on every surface. The shadows, by contrast, were deep. The palm tree’s fronds whispered, but nothing else moved besides the two white-gowned, white-haired women.

  “The walls,” Tirzah whispered. “What is that?” She pointed at a fissure in the plaster with one of her shortened fingers.

  “It has been neglected,” Naomi answered. “I suppose nobody lives here. Nothing has been repaired.” She nudged a pile of tile shards with her sandal. “See, the tiles are coming off the roof.”

  They inched along the wall to the gate. “And what is that?” Tirzah asked. She set down the basket and stepped forward. “It looks like a seal. Have they sealed our house?”

  “To keep out thieves, perhaps. But look, Tirzah. Oh, look at the sign!” A foot above their heads hung a wooden placard. It had once been sturdy. The paint had been fresh, some eight years earlier, when someone had written, This is the property of the emperor. Now the paint was faded, but the message remained.

  “‘The property of the emperor’?” Tirzah asked. She should understand, she knew. What did it mean, that the emperor now owned their house?

  “They have taken everythi
ng,” Naomi breathed. She turned her back to the massive gate and slid down until she was sitting. “There is nothing left for Judah!”

  Tirzah took five tentative steps away and surveyed what she could see of the vast facade. Then she hobbled back and sat down next to her mother. “I had not remembered . . . It is so big. So grand. I didn’t know. We lived in splendor, didn’t we?”

  Naomi nodded. “At the time, it just seemed like comfort. And of course, we housed all of those servants. And we had tenants.” She buried her head in her hands. “I never thought . . .” The thread of her voice rose. “Nothing for Judah!”

  “Mother,” Tirzah hissed, suddenly angry. “Judah is dead! He must be dead, or he would have found us!”

  Naomi sighed. “What do you remember of that day?” she asked.

  Tirzah sighed. “So little. More at first, but it has faded. I kept going over it, wondering if I could have changed anything. Maybe if I hadn’t told Judah about the soldiers, he wouldn’t have leaned over to see them? I remember I woke him with a song. And I remember our porter Shadrach, how they just . . . The blood.” She shook her head. “I had never seen death. And the red cloaks everywhere. And those breastplates. All that glitter and those hard edges. And the shouting.”

  “Nothing they said?”

  “No,” Tirzah said. “It was so confusing. Did they say anything?”

  “Did you remember it was Messala who named Judah?” Naomi asked.

  Tirzah turned to look at her and was shocked, once again, to see her mother’s ruined face. But what she had said was just as shocking. “Messala betrayed Judah? His friend?”

  Naomi nodded. “And ordered them to take him to the galleys. Do you know what that is?”

  “Ships?”

  “Yes. Rowed by slaves. Judah was taken away to row in a Roman ship.”

  “And that’s why you think he is alive?”