The Artifact (46 page)

Yehoshua rose, shaking his head, then walked a couple of dozen paces away until he was a mere shadow among the thick stand of trees and brush. After what seemed interminable moments he returned to us. “I suppose I must go away for a time.”

Judah clasped a hand on his knee. “We shall leave tonight.”

James and I made our farewells to Yehoshua, who was led off into the darkness by Judah and other shadows falling in behind them beyond the clearing. James and I sat in the darkness listening to the night sounds of owls, crickets and predators until Yehoshua and the Zealots were well on their way up the main road to the north. I threw dry twigs on the embers, staring with an empty mind at the tiny flames I had coaxed to life.

James scooped earth up in his hands absently allowing it to trickle through his fingers. “Let us go home at first light, Shimon. We must assure our parents that Yehoshua is safe and resume our normal lives. No one except we two must know more.”

One day in the week that followed, after James had returned to Jerusalem, I was partaking of the evening meal under the entrance awning of our home with my family, when we heard the thunder of many hoof beats on the path to the Sepphoris road. I rose and grabbed my cane, but before I could escape, a troop of heavily armed soldiers surrounded our house on snorting mounts lathered with white foam.

Mother wrung her hands on the table before her at the ill fortune that was decimating our family. “They will return and torture you.”

I tied my sling around a rolled shelter cloth, filled a calabash with spring water and assured my saddened family that both Yehoshua and I would return as soon as the Romans became preoccupied with other matters. Probably two, three months at the most. Neither James nor I had told the family where Judah had taken Yehoshua, so they could not reveal his whereabouts. Although the Romans would reverse their chase quickly once they had learned from taverns and travelers that Yehoshua had not passed that way, I trusted my head start on the Romans would allow me to remain in the lead during the one hundred or more kilometer distance to the Sea.

As a diversion, I took the longer route that night from Nazarat to the port of Haifa, setting into the rhythm of my comfortable, lopsided jog through the darkened fields and forest, avoiding the paved road the mounted Romans would use. My track took me along the outskirts of Sepphoris, where my thoughts turned to my past pleasures with Yentl. Already distressed by my forced exile from my family, I realized those erstwhile trysts would also end. My loins overpowered my brain by rationalizing that the Romans would not ride all night or turn from their gallop south until morning, when they would detour to my home to find me, giving me plenty of time to dally.

As I tossed pebbles through her bedroom window, it never occurred to me that her husband Stephen would be at home, nor on that night choose to sleep with his wife. It took me aback no end, therefore, when the old man with close cropped white beard and hairless dome appeared through a first floor portal holding a flickering lamp, armed with sword. Yentl clutched the bodice of her billowing sleep robe as she peered around him with an expression of concern.

“It is the crippled carpenter from Nazarat,” she exclaimed, laying doting fingertips on her husband’s shoulder.

My feeble explanation of seeking food for my escape to Cyprus from the Romans was received by Yentl with suppressed laughter and by her husband with a scowl of incredulity. “I could slay you here as an intruding thief,” he said, “and the Romans would thank me.”

Yentl was enjoying the irony of the encounter, apparently sure that I would come to no harm at the hands of Steven. “Do not splash his blood on your new nightgown, dear.”

I began to speak, what words I know not, when the elderly man held a hand out to forestall my lies. “I suppose I would rather be cuckold in secret by one boy than a dozen bragging men.”

“Your honor, I swear that....”

“Swear to nothing, worthless scoundrel and listen. I abhor our pagan captors as well as any Jew. I wish you a speedy journey to Greece or any place far from here.”

“That is my intention.”

“Take the main road to Haifa, where you may be able to hide in or around the aqueduct if they come that way. Not the northern route you have been following, which the Romans will expect.”

Yentl returned with a parcel of food and handed it to me in silence accompanied by her enigmatic smile.

After his questionable advice Steven waved me away and sword in hand, left me confronted by Yentl in the wavering light. “May God walk beside you,” she whispered, then grasped the oil lamp and was gone, leaving me standing outside the portal in darkness.

I have never been good at taking advice, and stood there with the sack of food in their courtyard contemplating my circumstances. If that cunning old man had put me on the wrong course, he could rid himself of me, ensure my punishment for bedding his wife, and never become involved with the Romans.

I relate the following embarrassing account of the next day as briefly as possible: ignoring Steven’s well-intentioned recommendation, I continued along my original route north through the night, only to find half the pursuing Romans waiting for me as I entered the gates of Haifa. I have often wondered since what sort of man not only ignores a humiliating offense by another, but also attempts to save his adversary from danger. Compassionate old Steven had evidently forgiven my transgressions against him and would have rescued me from well-deserved punishment. I would experience this concept of absolution again, but I must confess that it makes almost as little sense to me now as it did then.

The cavalry soldiers took me down to Caesarea where prolonged flogging and torture failed to reveal the whereabouts of Yehoshua. I was brought beaten and bloody before one of Pilate’s magistrates, convicted of aiding a suspected rebel and sentenced to a lifetime of slavery under the cruel heel of the Roman Empire.

My life for the next three years is not worth recounting. Suffice it to say that I was employed in the circus in Caesarea first as attendant to
bestiarii
⁴³
sweeping dung from the stalls of lions, tigers, giraffes, elephants, ostriches, prodding them through the tunnels under the stadium into cages, then dragging their carcasses off the arena floor after they had been killed by another animal, gladiators or
bestiarii
for the enjoyment of the crowds. Following each event, I would sweep the blood and organs of creatures and men off the arena sand before the contest to follow.

My initial awe and revulsion at the unimaginable, inhumane circus spectacle enjoyed by Romans and other gentiles did not completely recede during my lengthy involvement in it, and to this day is the most unfathomable, degenerative facet of a purported civilization that encompasses three-quarters of the known world.

Those early years of my existence in the dim, underground cells below the amphitheater in Caesarea remain an exhausted, demeaning time in which my normally accurate memory ceased to function. Days merged into nights into weeks into months into years of sitting on wet earth, chained at the neck to men on either side of me, our backs against damp cavern walls. We were clothed in the same filthy rags month after month, thirsty, hungry for the same barley slop we fed the animals that were not carnivorous, constantly weary from the brutish work and the near impossibility of sleep in our short chains on rocky ground, embattled by sharp-tooth rodents gnawing at our weary flesh that eluded our grasp, delighted at our infrequent success at snaring and choking one to supplement our meager meals.

Working around wild animals purposely starved to encourage their attack on unarmed slaves was a constant threat to limb and life. That peril was intensified for me by a leg that often impeded my rapid exit from danger. If I had remained in those circumstances longer, the depths of exhaustion and despair would surely have caused my demise below the arena of Caesarea in the claws of some ferocious beast or by my own hand, except for a fortuitous incident one hot summer morning that took place before ten thousand screaming spectators.

On that occasion, I was the last man dragging the mauled corpse of a tiger from the arena to the death tunnel when my hook slipped from the body, and I had to reset it before I could shoulder the ropes again and drag it away. The crowd had been murmuring impatiently waiting for the next contest, when I heard a burgeoning uproar from the stands behind me and whirled to see a huge lioness with matted orange fur on sunken ribs, bared fangs in her frothing mouth crouched on her open cage in the center of the ring. When several animals are required, they are usually prodded into the arena through a gate in the retaining wall, but when only one is needed, its cage is lifted from the tunnels below on pulleys, then a single ingenious pin is pulled to drop all sides of the iron bars at once, leaving the animal completely free. This lion was to be pared with a single gladiator or
bestiarii
, who had not yet stepped out on the
harena
⁴⁴
The glare of the roaring animal and shouting spectators were glued to my predicament.

“Oh, God! Save me!” A ridiculous plea directed at the very One who had placed me in this circumstance. Did I now expect Him to swoop down from heaven to strike the lioness dead at my frightened supplication?

Running was out of the question. I jerked the meat hooks from the corpse at my feet and waited, my only hope the emergence of the gladiator intended to oppose the beast. People in the stands threw stones and food and sandals at the lioness to stimulate her charge. Then with a great roar and swing of her massive head the voracious beast crouched lower, preparing to spring. My knees trembled, sweat blurring my eyes fixed on the object of my certain death, the tension in her hindquarters as she soared into flight. At that same instant I heard a shrill whistle slice through the din and my side vision caught an object twirling toward me high against the blue sky, its silver blade flashing in the brilliant sunlight. A surge of hope coursed through my body as I dropped the hooks, grabbed the hilt of the tumbling sword with both hands in mid air, twisting, kneeling under the animal’s final leap to thrust the razor-honed shaft up into its belly with my entire strength, eviscerating that savage creature as it soared over and collapsed beyond me. I remained kneeling in my own urine until my hearing was of a sudden blasted by the yells and screams and stamping feet of spectators. The message of their rhythmic shouts finally penetrated my mind, and I jumped up to raise the blessed sword high above me and beheaded the still writhing animal with a single devastating blow. I cut an ear off the decapitated beast and paraded around the arena holding it aloft as was the custom.

Upon completing a full circle to the satisfaction of the crowd, I spied Vespasian’s old trainer, Fabian, approaching from behind a protective barricade beside the gladiator tunnel. It was impossible to hear speech over the noise from the stands, which had erupted to a mind-blanking volume when Fabian gestured for me to place my good foot on the carcass of the lioness and raise the sword in hand over my head in victory.

The next day, a guard unchained me from my neighbors in the slave quarters and brought me to a tiny sunlit room under the stands that Fabian shared with another
lanista
⁴⁵
as an office while in Caesarea. He kept me standing before his table, inquiring about the misfortune that had brought me there. He explained his decision to remain behind in Palestine when Vespasian’s family returned to Rome and how he had used his savings from the army and his own gladiator days to procure several gladiator slaves. During the past few years he had supplemented those early fighters with others, training and engaging them in battle in arenas throughout the provinces for profit.

Standing there in my filthy, bloodstained rags, I envied his success, his comfortable room, his clean toga, but most of all, his freedom.

“I congratulate you on your success,” I told him, and again expressed my indebtedness to him for saving my life.

“I had not expected a crippled Jew to master swordplay.”

I shifted my weight from bad to good leg, my bare arm warmed by the rays of the sun that came through his window as I waited to learn why he had summoned me.