Bloodline (44 page)

Though not a soldier, Abraham tended those who had been struck by spears or arrows and carried to safety by their comrades. He used his herbs and other medicines to cure men who suffered the ailments caused by being constantly outdoors, sleeping and eating in the wild, and living such a harsh life.

Samuel had anonymously sent Abraham's wife a purse full of coins minted by the Roman procurator in Judea, Porcius Festus, as well as another purse containing silver shekels in case the Roman coins weren't acceptable where she shopped for food and drink. She prayed that these amazing gifts came from her husband, even though she didn't know if he was alive or where he was.

Knowing his wife had money and that she and their children wouldn't starve was good news, but Abraham wanted to tell her that he was being held against his will, guarded every night to
prevent him escaping, and forced to march with the army when it attacked the Roman foot patrols. But he couldn't because he knew that were he to try to smuggle a letter to her, Jonathan would read it before it was sent.

Abraham woke early the next day knowing that another raid on a Roman patrol would be taking place shortly after morning prayers. He prepared his special fighting brew in a large pot of water gathered the previous evening from the river. Into the boiling pot he put herbs, spices, the stems of mountain flowers, honey, and what he told the men was a special ingredient that he refused to disclose, but which he assured them had been passed down to him from the acolytes of the great Greek doctors Androcydes, Eudoxus of Cnidus, and Hippocrates of Cos. In fact, it was a simple tincture of horseradish—bitter, pungent, and guaranteed to make strong men flinch. But the brew's acrid unpleasantness made the men believe that it really gave them strength, and as long as they believed the medicine was doing them good, then it did them good. Even Jonathan said that since Abraham had joined the group, the men were now fighting with increased vigor and stamina.

As the men gathered up their weapons and prepared to walk from their cave hideouts in the mountains through ravines and escarpments—eventually arriving at the valley where they would wait silently on ledges for the Roman patrol of forty or fifty men to pass below them on the floor of the ravine—Jonathan sauntered over to Abraham, who was clearing away his equipment.

“Doctor, your medicine again has given me and my men the strength to continue our fight.”

Abraham shrugged. “That's why you brought me here.”

“And to cure those who are sick.”

Abraham remained silent.

“Tell me, Doctor, have you taken any of your own medicine?”

“Why would I need to?” he asked.

“Because for months you've been attending to the health of
the Zealot army, but you've not yet seen what the army does or how it does it. So today will be different, and you will need your strength.”

Abraham looked at him coldly. They had never liked each other, and although Abraham had kept his mouth shut since his abduction, it was obvious that he still considered himself an unwilling captive and not a participant in what the freedom fighters were hoping to achieve.

“You wish me to accompany you. But if you wish me to fight, you will be disappointed. I am a healer. A doctor. I cure people. I don't kill them.”

Jonathan smiled. “I want you to observe. I don't want you to participate. I want you to understand why we're fighting and what it is that we're fighting for.”

“Why do you assume that I don't know that, Jonathan? I know what you're doing. I disagree with the way you're doing it.”

“And you think that meekly allowing the Roman heel to crush our necks is how our lives should be led?” he said aggressively.

“And how many of our men will die, how many women will be made widows and how many children will become orphans, while you and your army fight? Is there a better way to rid ourselves of the Romans? I don't know, but I do know that violence will lead to more violence, which will lead to more horrors than you can contemplate. You haven't, but I have seen Rome and some of its empire. Its strength is formidable. We aren't even a consideration to Rome when its senate meets. Its emperors are increasingly unbalanced, and if we're noticed by emperors as insane as Caligula and Nero, they'll send armies to crush us as the Romans have crushed the Iceni of the Britons and the Gauls and the tribes of Germania, and then we Jews will be no more; we'll be slaughtered by the thousands and exiled throughout all the countries in the world.”

“Nonsense,” said Jonathan quietly, hoping that his men couldn't
overhear what Abraham was saying. “We've beaten great armies before, and—”

“And look at the nations who sent their armies against us, Jonathan. Without any assistance from us, the Egyptians, the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Persians, and the Greeks are all gone or are in decline. If we wait, then Rome, too, will stumble and fall. All conquerors seem invincible at the time, Jonathan, but they all make the mistake of growing too quickly; they become arrogant and then their empire begins to fray at the edges like cheap cloth.”

Jonathan shook his head. “So instead of just waiting meekly like servants at a banquet for Rome to decay and decline, why don't we give them a hand? Let's prick them in their rear with our sharp needles. Let's annoy them and irritate them with our daggers and spears. Don't you understand, Abraham, that we want them to send an army to try to beat us into submission? This land isn't Britain or Germania or Gaul, where the landscape is flat and smooth. Israel is a rugged land, completely unsuited to vast war machines. Our rocky hills and steep valleys will make their ballistae, catapults, and battering rams useless. They won't be able to transport them, and so they'll have to fight us with hand weapons. And there's no stronger or more resolute army than ours when it comes to bows, arrows, spears, and slingshots, which we'll rain down on them like crushing hail from our sky.”

Abraham sighed. He'd been in Rome during the reign of the emperor Claudius, when twenty thousand blue-skinned Britons had been hauled in chains through the streets toward the Senate building after a humiliating victory by the Roman armies. Their leader, sullen and resentful, was pulled by oxen in a cage on a cart. And Britain, Abraham had been told, was just as rugged as Israel.

How little the Jews knew of the rest of the world and what they were facing in fighting against the Romans. The Babylonians,
the Egyptians, and the Greeks had produced great armies that they'd marched across the face of the world, but their men had fought as individuals. The Romans, though, had made war into an art as well as a science and were the most deadly force of men ever to have carried weapons into battle. The men were trained over years to fight as one, whether they were a century, a cohort, or a legion; when they went into battle, the soldiers fused together and formed the shape of a turtle with their shields, and when they fought against an enemy army, they used techniques like the buffalo, with the main body attacking the opposition head-on while the horns of the buffalo surrounded the flanks of the enemy and massacred them from the sides and back.

He drank some of the strengthening brew he'd made for the men, praying to Adonai Elohim that it might give him some fortitude. No matter how often he explained the Roman warfare techniques, Jonathan and those commanders around him told him that such weaponry or military tactics were useful in lands where there were open plains, but in the rugged mountains and valleys of the Galilee and Judea, such techniques could not easily be employed.

S
ARAH, WIFE OF
A
BRAHAM BEN
Zakkai, walked awkwardly, nervously, to the door of the home of Samuel the merchant, high on the hill of Jerusalem. Her heart beating, she knocked on the door. It was opened by a huge black man, a Nubian, who looked down at Sarah and frowned.

“Yes?”

“I wish to speak with your master,” she said.

He smiled condescendingly and told her, “Servants use the entrance in the back of the house. This door is for—”

“I'm not a servant. I'm the wife of Abraham ben Zakkai, the doctor. I wish to—”

The moment Abraham's name was mentioned, the servant beamed a huge smile and opened the door wide. “Please, lady, enter this house. You and your family are welcome here. Your wonderful husband saved my life and that of the woman who is now my wife. He is a marvelous doctor, your husband. I hope he's well and prospering.”

She sighed and followed him into the bowels of the house, where he asked her politely to sit in an antechamber while he fetched his master.

Samuel appeared shortly after and looked at her in surprise. “Yes? You're the wife of the doctor? What can I do for you?”

“Sir,” she said softly, “my husband, Abraham, is a good man. A loving husband and a father. He has been abducted. I don't know who has him or whether he's alive or dead. I haven't seen him for four months and I'm in despair. Please, please, can you help me? My children are grieving and I have nobody else to turn to. You're a friend of the Romans. Has he been abducted by them and sent to a prison? Has he been taken by this new group all Jerusalem is talking about? I'm desperate. Can you help me find him?”

Samuel looked disconsolate. “Lady, with all my heart, I'd love to help you, but I have no idea where he has gone. I've met him once, briefly, when he came to my home to cure my servants. He has probably been taken as a doctor by these Zealot people, as you suggested. But I will ask and make inquiries. I know where you live and so if I hear anything I'll tell you immediately.”

He reached onto his table and picked up a purse of money. He held it out to her. “I'm sure you'll need this . . .”

She smiled and shook her head. “Thank you, sir. You're kind. But I want my husband, not money.”

She nodded in deference and made her exit. And he felt ashamed that he'd lied to such a good, loving, and honorable young woman.

S
AMUEL THE MERCHANT
left the camp and returned to Jerusalem to find out more information that could be of assistance to Jonathan and his men. So far, the raids that they'd undertaken had caused serious casualties among the Romans, but far more damaging than dead soldiers to the Roman commanders was the loss of face. Men died all the time in war, but for a legion to lose its eagles, for a cohort to lose its banner, was a loss of face that had to be corrected. And so, under orders from the Senate in Rome, measures were put in place that would see this nasty little rebellion quashed.

Jonathan and his men marched north and west from their secret camp to the ancient Jewish city of Sepphoris, which the Romans had renamed Diocaesarea when they built their fortress. The Zealots weren't going into the city, for they'd be slaughtered by the soldiers, but were planning an attack on a platoon of about eighty men, which constituted a century, returning from a scouting mission and led by a particularly vicious centurion. The Jews would hide in the hills about four leagues from Sepphoris and then rain hail fire, stones, and weapons down onto the valley road. By the time the soldiers' bodies were discovered, Jonathan and his Zealots would have disappeared into the hills, preparing for another strike in another part of the country.

Exhausted at the end of the two-day march over the trackless wastes of the Galilean hills and valleys, Abraham was grateful to be told to watch the massacre of the Romans from a safe place high on a hill. The Jewish Zealots positioned themselves halfway down the hill, concealed by trees, rock ledges, outcrops, and the mouths of the numerous caves. They lay flat on the earth, out of sight of the track that ran through the valley floor beside a thin stream, ready when the first arrow was let loose by Jonathan to send down their spears, rocks, and arrows in a deadly storm that would kill all the Romans in the century. The track led from the north to the south and eventually to the city of Sepphoris, and Jonathan had chosen a place of hiding that was just
to the south of a bend in the arm of the valley. It meant that the Romans would march around the bend, blind to their assailants, and walk into the trap.

Abraham lay on the rock ledge high above the theater below him. He could clearly see some of the Zealots hiding and waiting, and from his vantage point he could see the road clearly. There were more than fifty Zealots assembled in the heat of the midday sun, like spiders lying in wait for flies to be snared by their web.

Time passed slowly as Abraham waited. He was both surprised and pleased that the Zealots far below him maintained their discipline, despite the boredom of waiting. On three occasions the men were roused by the noise of travelers walking toward Sepphoris. One was a goatherd urging his animals forward. The next interloper was a man on a donkey singing a song, oblivious to the dozens of deadly soldiers looking at him in amusement from their hideouts. And the third was a group of young girls giggling as they walked back to their homes in the city.

More time passed, and Abraham feared that they would have to spend the night in silence as they waited. Intelligence from a sympathizer in the city of Sepphoris informed Jonathan that the century would be returning this day after patrolling the central parts of the Galilee. They would be led by a burly and aggressive centurion by the name of Marcus Julius Tertius, hated for his brutality and feared by those under his command. Few would mourn his demise.

It was late in the afternoon, when the sun's shadows were casting a darkening gloom over the valley floor, that the men became aware of the noise of animals and cart wheels and leather-clad feet marching beyond the bend in the road. Though not yet in sight, all became alert to the sounds on the compacted earth of the road. The sounds grew louder and louder and Abraham could see all of the Zealots, many now hidden by shadows, silently reaching for their spears, bows, arrows, and rocks. Suddenly the first of the century, led by a tall, heavyset Roman riding
a horse, appeared around the bend of the valley. He was followed by rows of soldiers walking three abreast. In the middle of the century were four carts pulled by oxen, laden with food, weaponry, and tents. They were marching straight into Jonathan's trap, and it was so obvious that they would soon be slaughtered. Despite their being Romans, Abraham said a brief prayer to the Almighty for their lives.