The Last Temple Page 3
“The big one,” Vitas said. “Because he is mute and illiterate. There is no way for him to answer an interrogator.”
Nor, Vitas could not help but think, was there a way for Jerome to explain why he almost murdered Vitas, then changed his mind.
“The mute one assaulted me too,” Dolabella said.
“Then,” the magistrate said in a soothing voice to Dolabella, “we will assume he is guilty as well.”
This was Vitas’s opportunity to protest and explain that he was a Roman citizen. But to prove it would expose his identity, and without doubt news of his whereabouts would reach Nero, who believed that Gallus Sergius Vitas, a man once among Nero’s innermost advisers, had died in the arena. Perhaps if Vitas was fortunate, after proving his citizenship and securing his freedom, yes, he could flee Caesarea to escape Nero, but that would mean he would lose the chance to find out whom he’d been set up to meet at the synagogue.
Instead, Vitas had no choice but to hide his citizenship and hope for the timely return of the one person he’d learned from experience was all too often unreliable. His brother, Damian.
To save the others from torture, Vitas would take full blame here and count on Damian’s promised return the next day to explain that Helva himself had hired Vitas to be a spy, and the reasons for it. Although Helva was dead and could not confirm this, Damian had been shrewd enough to get a contract from him in writing. Furthermore, Helva had sealed the contract with molten wax and the stamp from his ring, leaving a raised surface on the wax seal.
“The mute is not guilty of anything except being in the wrong place at the wrong time,” Vitas told the magistrate. “The attack was planned, not simply an assassination of opportunity.”
“What?” The magistrate was startled.
“Find out who owns the camels,” Vitas told the magistrate.
“What are you talking about?” The magistrate puffed his chest, posturing for the attractive widow.
“If you have any political ambition at all, find out who owns the camels that were crossing the market when the Sicarii attacked. Find out who arranged the transport of the goods on those camels. Take that information to the governor. Tell him the question about the camels comes from the slave named Novellus, who was sold to Helva by the Roman citizen Gallus Sergius Damian.”
“Gallus Sergius Damian?” The magistrate laughed. “And to which brothel should we send the governor to look for Damian?”
“The governor will know what to do with that information,” Vitas said. “And you will be rewarded for it.”
“This is exactly the insolence and disobedience you would expect from a slave like this,” Dolabella said. “Can’t you see?” She slipped her arm around the magistrate’s ribs and drew him close. “I should not have to endure this. Not when I’m so badly in need of comfort.” She murmured something in the man’s ear.
“Yes, yes,” the magistrate said to her. He pointed at Vitas, using his free hand. “Tomorrow at dawn, you and the other slaves will be crucified.”
Moon
Hora Prima
Vitas had not slept for hours, knowing what was ahead. Soldiers had moved Vitas and Jerome and the other criminals to the public thoroughfare just outside Caesarea, where the frequent crucifixions were intended to serve as a display of the empire’s power and a deterrent to further crime or sedition.
With the sun barely up, the soldiers approached. What Vitas had been dreading had arrived.
The sleepless early dawn had afforded Vitas too much time to think about his lapse in watchfulness. Too much time to consider how even if Damian returned to Caesarea this day as promised, it would be too late to save Vitas or Jerome from the hammer blows. It wasn’t that Vitas doubted the sincerity of Damian’s promise. While Damian wasn’t fully dependable, long gone were the days of his wanton irresponsibility. A few years earlier—when Vitas and Maglorius had rescued him from certain death in the arena—Damian’s close brush with mortality had sobered him. He’d discovered a talent as a slave hunter, and while it would have been impossible to repress Damian’s charm, he had realized that accountability had its merits as another hunting tool. If Damian didn’t return from Jerusalem as promised, it was likely because he was delayed by the political volatility of the region.
Vitas expected, then, that he would die on a cross.
He’d had time in the early hours to think about the irony. Sophia’s fervent faith had come about because of the eyewitnesses’ accounts of the resurrection of the Christos after his crucifixion. There was so much that was appealing about Sophia’s faith and how it gave her life purpose. Often in quiet moments, especially when mourning Sophia’s death, Vitas wanted that same certainty of life beyond this life. Of any reason to worship the Christos, for Vitas, this was the greatest: to be reunited with Sophia after death.
But the two stumbling blocks to acceptance of the Christos were too great. How could Vitas believe a man was a prophet if he predicted the total destruction of Jerusalem within the lifetime of those who heard him, when it was so clearly impossible? And how could he believe that any man could return to life, especially after the hideously torturous death of crucifixion?
So here was the irony that Vitas had been unable to avoid during his sleepless early dawn. His only hope beyond death was to believe in and accept the Christos, who had died in the same horrible way Vitas was about to die.
Unless, by some miracle, Damian would arrive in time to take them down from their crosses while they were still alive.
Nearly a dozen crosses were already up from previous days, each with a sign describing the crime that had led to the punishment. Some crosses held men who had expired during the night. Others held criminals who had been there for up to three days, even four. Men died slowly on a cross, most often from dehydration.
Vitas had supervised an occasional crucifixion during his military time, and he knew that fighting the soldiers was not only useless but would result in more injury. Still, it took all his willpower not to jerk away and struggle as four of them pushed Vitas flat on a cross on the ground, his arms spread. He wore nothing but rags wrapped around his midsection. The hole for the base of the cross was a couple feet away. Once the impaling spikes secured him to the cross, the soldiers would heave his weight upward and slide the base of the cross into the hole, leaving his feet only inches off the ground.
A fifth soldier held a spike with tongs, the point of the spike centered in Vitas’s left palm. The tongs were a safety measure. It was common for a hammer to miss the spike and smash a prisoner’s fingers. No sense putting a soldier’s hand in the same danger.
A sixth soldier lifted his hammer for the first blow. Vitas took a deep breath. In the hours alone in his cell, clinging to memories of his wife, Vitas had believed he’d prepared himself for the pain.
The hammer came down, ringing on the spike. Vitas flailed as the iron spike went through the center of his left palm. He bit completely through the strip of thick leather that the soldiers had provided him to clench between his teeth. The leather had not been provided out of mercy but because the soldiers were long weary of the screams that came with each hammer blow.
Pain shuddered through his entire body. This was infinitely beyond the dread he’d already suffered. Ahead were two or three spikes for each hand, then spikes through his anklebones. How could he endure it? Or the hours of agony ahead in the sun? What insane impulse had led him to defy Dolabella in the market?
Another spike placed against his palm, held by the tongs.
Another swift upward motion of the hammer.
“Stop!” The order came from the centurion.
Damian, Vitas thought, sagging in relief. His brother had returned in time. Or nearly in time. While the first spike had not gone through any of the bones in his hand, it was going to leave a nasty hole.
“No more spikes,” the centurion said, standing above Vitas and the soldiers who crouched over him. “No spikes for him or the mute one. Ropes instead.”
The soldiers bound one of his wrists, then the other, to the horizontal beam of the cross.
They pounded spikes into the vertical beam, near the base, where the spikes should have gone through his ankles. They bent his legs sideways, so that when his feet were immobile, his thighs would cramp without any chance of respite. They bound his feet in such a way that the weight of his body on the spikes would make the iron bite cruelly into the arches of his feet.
When Vitas was in place, they lifted him and secured the base. Arms wide, his body weight held by the tight ropes around his wrists and by the one spike already in his hand, he pushed down with his feet to support himself. Within seconds, the spikes tore into his skin. To find relief from it, he sagged against the ropes bound tightly to his wrists, against the spike in the center of his palm, and new pain flared into the skin there. The weight of his body tore against his arm muscles.
That, however, wasn’t the worst of it. Without his feet to support his weight, he was unable to expand his diaphragm with any effectiveness. Unable to draw even a quarter of a lungful of air, he began to suffocate. The sensation led him to unreasoning panic, and he pushed downward on his cramped legs, driving his torn feet into the spikes. He endured that pain as long as he could, then whimpered as he let his body hang from his arms again until suffocation drove him to push against his feet.
Flies settled on his face, darting to the moisture of his eyes. He blinked repeatedly, but the flies kept returning in swarms.
This was only the first five minutes of crucifixion.
Hora Tertiana
The soldiers stepped away from the final victim but remained nearby, telling jokes as they threw dice, howling with laughter and pretended outrage at the results of each throw. They ignored the wailing of the mothers and daughters of the men on the crosses. Armed with swords and spears, they weren’t worried about anyone, let alone women, trying to take down the criminals. The Romans did not care that families often gathered around those who were crucified; in fact, they often encouraged it. Seeing the agony of this torture up close, hearing the strained death rattles and the pleas for mercy, served to deter others who wished to avoid a similar fate.
The pain exhausted Vitas, and he dropped his head to his chest, ignoring the people who were walking into and out of Caesarea on this road. Time did not exist for him. A man could only acknowledge time when his mind was aware of hopes or dreads for the future, pleasures or regrets in the past. But the agony was so intense, it consumed all his senses and thoughts and kept him in the horrific present.
Vitas’s head hung only a few feet off the ground, and he saw the movement as an old woman stepped up to him and touched one of his knees. She held a stick, a sponge, and a bucket.
It was the ancient Jew, the woman from the market. She reached up and ran gnarled fingers over the spike in his hand, not flinching from the congealed blood.
“The centurion promised they would not use spikes on your hands,” she told Vitas. “I paid to use rope.”
“You?” When he spoke to the woman, it came out as a croak.
“Because of your kindness,” she said. “I was able to bribe him with the money you gave me in the market. I am sorry that even one spike pierced you.”
“There is nothing to be done about it,” Vitas said. Unless Damian appeared before Vitas succumbed to exhaustion and dehydration, Vitas was going to die. What did another injury matter, especially when his body was overwhelmed by other agonies? Even if the centurion commanded the spike be removed, the soldiers would likely break his fingers prying it out with a metal bar.
Vitas was looking at the bucket and the sponge and the stick. He was no coward, but he hoped she was about to offer a small mercy worth more to a man on a cross than a person could comprehend. Water. Perhaps more.
As if answering prayer, she dipped her sponge into the bucket and pushed it to his face on the short stick.
“Drink,” she said. “I spent the remainder of the money on poppy tears, mixed with water and wine.”
Vitas sucked at the sponge with greed. As a soldier in battle, when he’d required a surgeon to repair skin and muscle, he had never taken opiates. On the battlefield, he believed he needed a clear head at all times. Here, however, there was no reason not to drift along on the relief that would come with the opium. He was a dead man. Poppy tears were a gift beyond description.
“Tell me your name so that I can thank you properly,” Vitas said.
“My name is Arella,” she said. “But I’m the one who owes you. You defended me in the market. And gave me money. Men rarely show such kindness to an old woman.”
“Arella,” Vitas repeated. He groaned as he placed weight on his feet. But he needed a foundation to be able to draw breath, and he gasped for air when he was able to move his diaphragm. “I know some Hebrew. It means angel.”
“You know Hebrew?”
“I was married to a Jewish woman.”
“Yet you speak with the accent of a Roman.”
“She was the best thing that happened to me.” Vitas felt the tears well, then stream down his cheek. He wondered why he hated showing this weakness, even when he was as helpless as any man could be. “Please take care of the man beside me.”
Arella shifted a step sideways and also offered the mixture of wine and poppy tears to Jerome, who gulped at the sponge with the same desperation Vitas had shown.
“She belongs in a brothel,” Arella said, speaking to both of them. “The Roman with orange hair. Already it’s whispered that she spent the night with a Greek, and her husband not yet cold. The Greek was there, you know, in the market.”
All Vitas could manage were a few more croaked words. “You stayed?”
“No,” she said. “The Greek pulled her out from the table. She kicked me as he helped her leave. He was there when she shouted for soldiers to arrest you.”
The old woman pushed the sponge back up to Vitas. He could barely concentrate, and the poppy tears were beginning to dull his senses. He drank from the sponge again.
Soon, though not soon enough, his mind and body would no longer be connected. There was one thing he needed to know before he let himself go into a timeless void. Separated by soldiers, put into different jail cells, he had not had a moment to address his brother’s slave.
“Jerome!” Vitas said.
On a cross barely a couple of feet away, joined by the intimacy of dying, the mute turned his head to look at Vitas.
“You meant to kill me in the market,” Vitas said. “Yes?”
Vitas did not care that the old woman was listening.
Jerome strained to give a single ungh sound, the best he could muster, meaning yes.
Vitas often thought language was the single greatest thing that separated man from beast. Jerome could not speak, could not read or write. Because of it, the world had too often treated him like a beast.
“You changed your mind and spared me,” Vitas said. “Yes?”
The answer was another strained ungh.
There was a way to communicate with Jerome, but it was slow and frustrating and not always fruitful. It was to ask a series of yes-or-no questions—the success depended highly on the agility of the questioner’s mind.
“You had a good reason to kill me? Yes?”
“Ungh.”
“If you could, would you tell me why?”
“Ungh. Ungh.” No.
Another mystery that would not be solved before he died. Along with the letter that had sent him to Caesarea, the question of who had saved him from death in the arena in Rome and arranged his escape by ship with the disciple John, and the identity of the man who had just appeared at the synagogue this Sabbath, obviously looking for Vitas.
Vitas stared at the old woman and felt the tears glistening again in his eyes.
“May the remainder of your life be blessed,” he said. “You have no idea how much mercy you’ve provi
ded.”
“I do,” she said. “Two of my sons died to Roman crosses.”
She dipped her sponge in the bucket again and pushed it up to Vitas.
Hora Septina
The sun had moved beyond the midpoint of the day, a ferocious white ball of attack that pressed down on Vitas as he gasped for each new breath. Even with a cloth that the woman had draped over his face to offer shade and a privacy of sorts from the curious stares and occasional jeers of passersby, Vitas’s lips had cracked into fissures because of his body’s desperate need for water as it battled between suffocation and pain, exhausting him beyond his endurance. But Vitas was unaware of how he constantly swept his tongue across his lips in a useless effort, for the poppy tears had put him into pleasant dullness, where it seemed he had the freedom to rove through his mind, like a foreign visitor seeking idle amusement.
His awareness drifted away from the wailing cries of mothers tending to sons on nearby crosses and of little girls begging their fathers to come down and hold them.
Mercifully, he found himself no longer on a rough cross made of hewn wood, but in his childhood home at age twelve, climbing a tree in the villa’s garden with his brother and trying to stop Damian from throwing oranges at slaves in a neighboring garden—oranges Damian had stolen from the kitchen and carried into the tree in a sack. He remembered his sense of outrage when he was caught in the tree, appearing as if he were joining Damian, and his anger that he had to share Damian’s punishment.
In the hot sun, Vitas wept—not from pain, but from grief as his mind shifted from the villa to adulthood, where he strode through a battlefield in Britannia, the low green hills behind him in cold mist, the bodies of his soldiers scattered among the motionless women and children who had been slaughtered in ambush, his first and only son among them.
And as time shimmered like a distant mirage across the desert, he felt the joy of holding the hand of his wife, Sophia, sharing a flower-scented walk through the palace grounds of Nero, as they dreamed together of how they might raise their children.