The Boudicca Parchments (22 page)

And its rapid growth meant that new roads were constantly being built in the suburbs, while traffic was frequently log-jammed in the city centre. The new tramlink in Jaffa Road, far from alleviating the congestion, had augmented it because now cars, taxis and even buses were rerouted behind the
shouk
– the market – into a street far too narrow for them to navigate safely.

But the Sassons didn’t take the road behind the
shouk
. Instead they took another route that led them to an area of south Jerusalem, along a winding road that to its left had a panoramic view of the old city, the sun glinting off the golden Dome of the Rock, built by Muslims on the site where the ancient Jewish temple once stood, and now claimed by Muslims to the exclusion of the Jews.

Not that this bothered the man in the car. He believed that Jews should not enter the Temple Mount because they did not know where the Holy of Holies was situated. And as only the high priest was allowed in the Holy of Holies, it followed that no one – or at least no God-fearing Jew – should enter any part of the Temple Mount.

These thoughts were still with him as he followed the car past the roundabout by the forest just before Government House, the former British High Commissioner’s residence from the days of the British Mandate, now used by the United Nations. The roundabout took him into East Talpiot, a large sprawling neighbourhood with buildings of the ubiquitous near white or cream-coloured Jerusalem stone façade.

He held back as they turned off into another winding road, this one descending down a shallow hill. The reason for holding off was because he suspected that they had no more turnoffs and he didn’t want to make it to obvious that he was keeping them under surveillance.

After a couple of minutes, he went the same way, following the single road’s winding turns. A couple of times, he cast his gaze to the left, as gaps between the buildings gave him a panoramic view of the small valley on the other side of the hill against which these buildings had been built. These buildings were separate houses, attached middle eastern style with some atop one another, but each with a separate entrance from the street. To his right, on the upper part of the hill, were taller buildings containing apartments.

He noticed the car parked outside one of the buildings to his left, but kept his eyes on the road, except when they darted sideways as he passed the car that he had been following. He noticed that a gate was open and the Sassons – mother and children – were carrying suitcase downstairs to the lower house while Julia’s mother locked the car. Although the house was apparently in a basement, when viewed and entered from this side, he knew from the topography of the neighbourhood and the fact that it was against a hill, that it would actually have a panoramic view across the valley on the other side – and probably quite a nice garden.

But more importantly, he knew exactly where it was.

Chapter 52

Like every accident, the noise was followed by an eerie silence. Only after a while did the silence break and the normal background noises return. To some extent this was because of other cars stopping. But then most cars in the slow lane simply steered into the middle lane, even if they did rubberneck as they passed.

For Daniel it was a different story. He was busy unfastening his seat belt from his inverted posture and watching with relief as Ted did the same. But what about Sarit?

For a few seconds, it seemed as if she was not moving. But then she stirred.

“Sarit? Are you all right?”

“I’m fine.” Then her professionalism took over. “We need to get out of here.”

As they awkwardly clambered out from their inverted postures, they could hear the sound of emergency service sirens in the distance. Daniel, while still on his hands and knees, helped Ted out, after Sarit had ignored his extended hand. But when he tried to stand up himself, he found that he was quite unsteady on his feet, as if his sense of balance had gone, or at least been thrown out of whack temporarily.

For a second they stood there, their clothes in disarray, trying to get their breath back and regain their bearings and sensibilities.

“That was deliberate!” Ted gasped. “Some one was trying to kill us.”

“They were trying to kill
me
!” said Daniel sharply. He felt, now, the anger that he should have felt when they had a go at his sister and nieces.

“We need to get
out
of here!” said Sarit with even greater urgency as the sound of the sirens grew nearer.

“Shouldn’t we wait?” said Ted. “We should tell the authorities.”

“If we do, then Daniel is liable to get locked up – and possibly me too. Now I don’t know about you, but I’m out of here.”

And with that she climbed over a fence into a field and then began walking, first normally, then fast and finally running. Ted and Daniel looked at each other and realized that they had no alternative but to follow. For Daniel it made sense, but for Ted it was more a case of follow-my-leader.

But as Daniel looked back to see if Ted was all right, he noticed that the archaeology professor was holding the cardboard tube

“What’s that?”

“That’s what I want to show you.”

“Let’s save it for later,” said Daniel.

For a man of his age, Ted seemed remarkably fit, keeping up with Daniel with no trouble at all. The shortness of breath only showed when he spoke.

“Who’s trying to kill you Daniel?”

“Whoever killed Costa. And whoever took the
ketuba
from him.”

On the other side of the field, they climbed the fence again to find themselves on a narrow country road, wide enough for cars to pass each other with difficulty, but with no pavement to speak of. But a distance of about a hundred yards, separated Sarit from the men. Only when she had led for a few more minutes did she relent and turn round to see where they were. The distance was too great to carry their voices and she didn’t want to attract attention, so she waved to them to catch up.

But at that point they heard the thing they most dreaded: a helicopter. They all knew what this meant: the police were on to them. But this did not mean that they knew it was Daniel. Sarit had rented the car and Ted’s car was still at the motorway service station. The police would have had no way to link up the missing accident victims with any wanted persons. All they would know was that the people inside the overturned car had crawled away alive.

Of course leaving the scene of an accident was a crime and the police would certainly be looking for them. But if the police were basing their search on information that there were three people – two men and a woman – then the separation would work to their advantage. Daniel realized that their best bet for avoiding attention was not to be together.

Instinctively they knew what to do. Sarit turned and looked away from them and crossed to the other side of the road, like she had nothing to do with them. Ted and Daniel turned round and started walking back along the road in the opposite direction, so that in effect they would be walking towards the scene of the accident, if not actually following a path that would take them all the way there.

It occurred to Daniel that if anything the helicopter should be on the lookout for the truck. A vehicle fleeing the scene of an accident in which a car had been driven into a ditch was far worse than the passengers making their way away – especially as they might be seeking medical assistance. But maybe they already had the truck and were now free to focus their attention on the occupants.

At any rate, as the helicopter was in the distance when they first turned, they knew that they hadn’t been spotted already. They walked slowly and gesticulated freely, waving their hands in an animated fashion, as if they were not trying in any way to avoid being noticed. Obviously, they could not walk down onto the motorway, so after they were confident that they had been seen and dismissed from the police helicopters reckoning, they turned off into another side street and Daniel called Sarit from his new mobile phone to arrange a rendezvous.

It was a family-friendly pub/restaurant. Ted, who had already eaten, was limiting himself now to a salad, but the other two hadn’t eaten a proper meal since yesterday and were tucking into grilled steaks with pepper sauce. Daniel had chosen the fries, while Sarit had opted for a baked potato.

As Ted was eating the least, he was in the best position to be talking the most.

“So if Lanevshiah was Lanosea, then we could be talking about the daughter of Boudicca. And Farashotagesh, you said the F could be a P the S-H could be a plain S and some of the vowels could be misplaced. So I’m thinking… Prasutagus?”

Daniel nodded.

“It could be. Even though there isn’t a second
vav
to act as a placeholder for the second oo sound, there is a kind of soft double o sound that’s pronounced like in
book
rather than
soon
– and that softer vowel doesn’t need a placeholder.”

“So Prasutagus fits perfectly.”

“But who was he?” asked Daniel.

“He was the King of a Britannic people called the Iceni – Ikeni as the Roman’s called them. He was the husband of Boudicca.”

Now that, at last, was a name that Daniel recognized.

“The queen with flaming red hair who wore a golden torque and fought against the Romans.”

“Exactly Daniel. And damn near won!”

“I have to admit that I don’t know the story as well as I should.”

“Well for that you have to understand the background. Prasutagus was the king of the Iceni people in east Anglia until round about 60 or 61 AD. He was a client king or vassal of Rome. The custom was for client kings to hold their kingdom in their lifetime and then bequeath it to Rome upon their death. But when Prasutagus died, he left only half his kingdom to Rome and the other half to be divided between his wife Boudicca and their two daughters. Needless to say this outraged such a patriarchal society as ancient Rome.”

“So they seized the lands?”

“Well more than that. First they called in their loans – and it has to be said that Prasutagus and the Iceni nobility had been living on huge loans. One wealthy Roman creditor alone, Seneca the Younger, had lent them something like forty million sestertii – that’s a about fifty million pounds.”

“Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.”

“You’ve hit the nail on the head there Daniel. And the first thing they did to show their outrage was demand the money back –
with
interest!”

“And presumably the Iceni couldn’t pay it.”

“Obviously not. So the Romans seized all the lands and effectively enslaved the Iceni, including the nobles.”

“But how did a woman get to be their leader? I mean even if she was the king’s widow.”

“You have to bear in mind what the Romans did in addition to seizing the land. They had Boudicca publicly flogged.
And
they raped her daughters. And that was an act of defilement that the Iceni could not forgive. They were already a proud people who had rebelled against Rome once before when they were forced to disarm and now the Romans were defiling their queen and her daughters and this was all too much for them.”

“So they rallied under the banner of their queen.”

“Yes.”

“She must have been a pretty good military strategist – even if she did lose in the end.”

“Actually, she wasn’t. She just had demographics on her side.”

“How do you mean?”

“Well the Romans had decided that the druid priests were a major threat to them – far more so than the nobles or kings – because the kings and nobles were corruptible by bribery, but the Druids lived up to high ideals.”

“It’s always the clergy,” said Daniel with a wry smile.

“Exactly. But the druids were concentrated in what was then called Mona – modern day Anglesey in north Wales. And so the Romans had most of their army concentrated there on a systematic campaign of genocide to wipe out the druids. In fact this might have been the real reason for the conflict with the Brythonic peoples. It was Tacitus – and later Cassius Dio who told the story of Boudicca and neither of them were there at the time, although Tacitus’s father-in-law Agricola was.”

“So are you saying the whole story of the uprising is a myth.”

“Oh no, although the Roman sources certainly exaggerated the scale. But they may also have gilded the lily when it comes to the
causes
. Was it the flogging of Boudicca and the rape of her daughters or the massacre of the revered druids? Or maybe it was the rape and flogging in the case of the Iceni but the massacre of the druids that gave them the support of other tribes. But whatever the cause or causes, there certainly was a revolt. We know that from the archaeological records.”

“And what exactly did they do? I mean if they were in East Anglia and the Romans were in Anglesey, who exactly did they fight?”

“Basically, Boudicca and her rebel army – if one could call them an army – attacked those towns that were deemed to be representative of Rome, even if they were populated by their fellow Britons. The first place they attacked was the Roman town of Camulodunum. That’s modern day Colchester.”

“And that was originally a Roman city?”

“Well strictly speaking it had originally been a local city – the capital of the Trinovantes tribe. But by the time it was attacked by Boudicca it had become a Roman colonia – that was the highest status of Roman city, even larger than a municipalis. It was settled by retired Roman soldiers, who liked to lord it over the locals. That made it a perfect target for the irate Britons: not too well guarded, but symbolizing everything they despised about Rome. When the local Romans knew the British hordes were coming, they requested reinforcements from the Roman procurator, Catus Decianus. But he underestimated the scale of the problem and only sent two hundred auxiliaries.”

“That’s all they had?”

“Well no, not exactly. After Boudicca had laid siege to the city for two days, the commander of the Ninth Legion, the
Hispana
, sent some reinforcements to break the blockade. But still not enough, given the large size of the forces that had allied themselves to Boudicca. Most of the Roman forces were wiped out, but the cavalry got away, as did their commander, one Quintus Petillius Cerialis.”