The Inquest (11 page)

“Oh…” Varro looked them up and down. “I would estimate that you have passed…sixty-five years, perhaps.”

Both of the old men beamed.

“Eighty-four, this very year, the pair of us,” one of them announced.

“No!” Pedius exclaimed. “Truly?”

“I would hardly credit it,” said Varro with genuine surprise.

“I must confess, I would have lost a considerable amount wagering on it,” said Callidus, with a fig in his mouth. “Considerable.”

“It is true,” one of the pair said earnestly. “As Your Lordship says, we can thank the legion life for our longevity. All that marching was not wasted on us.”

“How long have you been in business here, old soldiers?” Varro asked.

“Since Nero was a boy, Your Lordship,” said one octogenarian. “Ever since we retired from the Gallica. We went to friends at Ptolemais when the rebels started their uprising at Jerusalem, and have not long since returned.”

“Why in the name of Jove we bothered to return is beyond me,” said the other. “Business is not what it used to be. The town is a shadow of what it once was, and as for the troopers we now have stationed here, those buffoons of Belgae are of no value to tavern keepers whatsoever. They are an insult to Bacchus!”

“They don’t drink!” said the other with disgust. “Imagine a Gaul or a German who doesn’t swill wine? They give the armies of Rome a bad name. You would have thought, with soldiers stationed in the town, we would be run off our feet. But, not so.”

“Why do they abstain?” Callidus asked.

“It is their custom,” said one of the pair, shaking his head. “Can you believe it? The Nervians say that wine makes men weak. Weak? Mollycoddles, the lot of them!”

“We hear,” said the second tavern keeper, lowering his voice to a conspiratorial level and leaning closer to the three men on the other side of the counter, “that a new colony of legion veterans is to be established in a pass in the hills of Samaria. Flavia Neopolis, they say it will be called. Do your lordships know if this is true?”

“I could not say,” Varro responded. “I have no knowledge of it, but that is not to say that it is not true. New colonies are the exclusive prerogative of Caesar.”

“If it were true, we were thinking of packing up and trying our luck there. Legion veterans know how to drink!”

“But we are no longer youngsters,” said the other, who was obviously not as enamoured with the idea. “The thought of moving our old bones to a new location is not an appealing one. It might be the death of us.”

“Abstentious Belgian troopers will be the death of us!” the other countered, bringing a chuckle from Callidus.

Varro now instructed Callidus to produce several more coins.

The eyes of the pair lit up. “Will it be wine after all, Your Lordship?” said one.

“No,” Varro replied. “I will have information.”

“What manner of information?” said one old man warily.

“There was a centurion stationed in this town during the latter years of the reign of Tiberius Caesar,” Varro said, recounting a story he had read in the Lucius Letter and watching the faces of the pair for their reaction. “This centurion was on good terms with the local Jewish community, and even endowed their synagogue. On one occasion, he sent to a Jewish priest, a man called Jesus of Nazareth, and asked him to cure a servant who was unwell. Do you know anything of the centurion, and that event?”

Both men were blank faced. “That was well before our time here, Your Lordship,” said one
cautiously, with his eyes on the money which Callidus had placed temptingly on the counter in front of him.

“You have not heard of the event, of a miraculous cure for the centurion’s servant by Jesus, or Joshua, of Nazareth?” Varro persisted.

“We have heard of Joshua of Nazareth,” said the other, “or Jesus as the Greeks call him. A miracle worker, some say, a bandit according to others. Galilee always had more than its fair share of Jewish bandits. Like a plague of locusts, they were.”

“There was a bandit leader by the name of Jesus in these parts just before the Revolt,” the first man remarked. “Jesus bar Shaphat. I think he was captured by Caesar Vespasianus at Tiberias.”

“We have heard of the centurion Your Lordship refers to,” said the other, with his eyes on the money. “As far as we know, he died here, many years ago.”

“You cannot confirm that Jesus of Nazareth cured this centurions servant?”

“We would like to, Your Lordship,” the less greedy of the two replied. “We would very much like to be able to help you. But, we cannot lie to a Roman knight.”

Varro nodded. Despite their lack of useful information, he pushed the money across the counter to them anyway.

The greedier tavern keeper quickly scooped up the money and slipped it into the leather purse hanging at his waist. “Your Lordship is a generous man. Would you care to visit us again this evening? We might be able to provide a little excitement for you in the back room, if you fancy your chances with the dice.”

Varro looked at him with surprise. “You can see that my man is carrying a lictor’s staff?” he said, pointing to Pedius’
bacillum
. “I am a Roman magistrate.”

The old man grinned stupidly. “Yes, but even magistrates need to relax.”

Varro burst out laughing. The irony of it amused him. He was the Questor of Syria, responsible for policing all illegal gambling in his provinces, and here was this man risking a fine of four times the value of the stake money found on the gambling table by inviting him to play dice in the tavern’s back room. “I will pretend I did not hear your invitation,” he said. “Just don’t let me catch you hosting a gambling session. In return for my temporary deafness, you can render me a service. Give them a notice, Callidus.”

Varro’s freedman produced a piece of vellum from the cloth bag slung over his shoulder and handed it to the tavern keepers. The two of them read the notice, penned by Artimedes, which contained the by now usual call for anyone with information about the circumstances surrounding the death of Jesus of Nazareth at Jerusalem to come forward.

“What does His Lordship wish us to do?” said one old man uncertainly.

“Post it, man!” Varro returned. “Nail it up here, beside your counter.” He patted a wooden post. “Display the notice where your customers can see it.”

“Oh, yes, we can do that,” said the tavern keeper. “Rely on us, Your Lordship.”

“Give us some more,” said his partner. “We’ll post them all around here.”

Within a few days the expedition packed up and moved on. As was becoming the norm, no information had been offered to the questor. Varro could not be sure whether it was because nobody existed who could provide the sort of information he was looking for or because informants were too afraid to come forward.

The column passed ten miles along the western shore of the Sea of Galilee to Tiberias, a city at the bottom of a bare hill at the lakeside. Tiberias too was in Agrippa’s realm. Four years before, because its rebel defenders had capitulated to General Vespasian, Tiberias had been spared from looting and destruction, although because of its narrow gate the Roman general had knocked down the southern wall to provide better access for his troops. Here King Agrippa had recently built a wide new southern gate.

Varro camped in the remains of one of Vespasian’s fortified positions south of Tiberias, between that city and Taricheae, scene of bitter fighting during the revolt. Conveniently, there was a hot spring here at the fortress site, with a bathhouse recently restored by Agrippa. The questor had the usual notices posted in both Tiberias and Taricheae, and at Callidus’ suggestion also paid a market crier to go through each city calling out the same message as that contained in the notices. Despite these initiatives, the days passed without any informants presenting themselves to Agrippa’s city governors in either Tiberias or Taricheae.

“The fighting around here was the most bloody I can remember,” said Martius, after he and Varro had gone into Taricheae with an escort of infantry and cavalry led by Centurion Gallo. They stood on a sandy beach below the city wall, beside the lake, looking across the water to the rocky Golan Heights looming over the eastern shore.

“It was here that you were wounded?” said Varro.

Martius nodded. “I felt nothing at the time, just broke off the arrow and continued on.” He pointed in the direction of the hill behind the town. “We had two thousand archers of our own up there, raining arrows down on the city walls. And there we were—Titus, General Trajanus of the 10th, a few of his centurions,
me
, and four hundred cavalry. We were supposed to be waiting for Titus’ father to join us with the main force, but Titus said, ‘What are we waiting for?’ He had been hit by a stone from the wall, and the injury had made him angry. So, with just four hundred men, we went over the wall.” There was no emotion in Martius’ voice. He retold the story like an historian, in an impartial monotone, keeping to the facts. “The odds were something like twenty to one against us, but we fought our way through the city, driving most of the defenders down here to the water. The rebels escaped out onto the lake in boats and on rafts.”

“They escaped completely?” Varro asked.

“No, they stayed out on the lake, waiting to see what we would do next, waiting for an opportunity to return and make a counter attack. Next day, Titus’ father sent us some light warships. So, the four hundred of us went on board and off we went, after the partisans on the lake. It was a battle unlike any you can imagine: in the boats, on the rafts, in the water. We fought like madmen. We slaughtered thousands of them out there. Some fled back to shore, so we gave chase and caught them here on the beach. Not one survived. They stood on the heaps of their dead to fight us, and not one survived. When we counted the bodies, it was something like seven thousand of them we had killed, in the city, on the lake, and here on the beach.”

Varro nodded slowly. He said nothing, just looked at the sand, and imagined it stained red with rebel blood.

“We left them where they died,” Martius went on. “On the shore, and floating like lilies out on the lake. It was the height of summer. The corpses soon bloated, and then over the next few days they quickly putrefied. The stink hung over the place for weeks.”

Varro turned and walked back toward the city’s water gate, and Martius followed a few paces behind. Standing a little way up the beach, with the end of his staff resting on the sand, was Lucius Pedius the lictor, and as Varro came up to him he had a strange, faraway look in his eyes.

“Is anything amiss, Pedius?” Varro asked, stopping in front of his lictor.

Pedius blinked, and then he looked at the questor. “No, my lord,” he assured Varro. “Nothing amiss. Just reflecting.”

“Well then, lead on.”

“Yes, my lord. Forgive me, my lord.” Pedius led the way up into the city.

Pedius was cursing the boy, and the boy kept swinging a sword at him. He may have been nine or ten years of age. His face was baby pink. He had gone overboard from one of the Jewish rafts, and among all the men thrashing in the bloodied water he somehow managed to both stay afloat and swing the short sword in Pedius’ face.

“Throw away your sword!” Pedius was yelling as he leaned over the low side of the war galley toward him. “Throw away your sword and I will save you, boy!” As he spoke, he lay aside his shield, freeing his left hand.

The boy reached up with his left hand and grabbed hold of the side of the boat.

“Now throw away the sword!” Pedius called.

But the Jewish boy only made another swipe at the centurion of the 10th Legion. Pedius reeled back, feeling a stinging sensation at the left side of his neck. Dropping his eyes, his could see his own red blood flowing. “You little swine!” His anger boiled. He swung his sword down over the boy’s left wrist. With a crunching of bone, the razor-sharp blade cleaved off the youth’s hand, the hand holding the side of the vessel.

Soundlessly the boy slid from view.

Pedius looked over the side. The child was floundering. The sword had disappeared from his remaining hand. “Now, give me your good hand, you little fool!”

The boy ignored him, grasping hold of the boat’s side with his right hand.

Pedius reached over to grasp the boy’s forearm and pull him inboard, to safety. “Better to live with only one hand than not to live at all, boy,” he called.

The youngster looked up at Pedius with eyes filled with hate, and spat in his face.

Again Pedius reeled back, as if the boys spittle was poisonous. Again, anger welled. “You spit in my face, when I’m trying to save your worthless hide!” Again the centurion brought down his sword, on the boy’s right wrist.

The severed right hand fell into the boat, and the boy disappeared from sight. Looking over the side. Pedius saw the top of the child’s head. The handless boy was trying desperately to stay afloat. To Pedius, life without hands was no life at all. Reaching over the side, he put his left hand squarely on top of the bobbing head, pushed the boy under, and held him down. For a time he felt the boy struggle. Then, he ceased to resist.

Gasping for breath, bathed in cold sweat, Pedius sat up: in his bed. For a moment, he had no idea where he was. Then it came to him. He was in his Varro expedition tent, camped between Tiberias and Taricheae, and he had just experienced the same nightmare that had haunted him for four years since that summer’s day when he had fought alongside Trajanus his general, and Titus, and Martius, out there on the lake, killing the defenders of Taricheae. During his twenty years in the Roman army, Lucius Pedius had killed many men, and the occasional woman and child. None of those children had come close to killing him. None had even tried to do battle with combat-hardened legionaries. Lucius Pedius never had cause to regret a single act while under arms for Rome, never had a sleepless night, until the death of the defiant Jewish child of Taricheae.

The lictor pulled himself from his bed, and called for his servant, Austin us.

“Water,” Pedius croaked when the man, a slender Ethiopian, appeared in front of him. “Water, and a change of tunic.”