The Last Temple (4 page)

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 provided.”

“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.

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.

Then moisture on his face pulled him back to a reality veiled with dull pain.

Arella had lifted the cloth from his head and pushed a sponge to his face again.

Yet as he lowered his head to the sponge, the delirium was so intense that he saw Sophia passing along the other side of the road, hemmed in by travelers, averting her face from the horrible spectacle of men impaled upon wood. It was only a glimpse of her face, but so real to him that he croaked in agony that struck his heart with far more force than anything the cross inflicted upon him.

Arella spoke. “Soon it can be over. Just give the word.”

“I saw her!” Vitas uttered. It took willpower just to draw air into his lungs. “My wife. She was there. Not dead! Jerome. Did you—?”

He stopped. The question was useless, and he was wasting precious breath. Jerome’s head was veiled too, with a small protective sheet that the soldiers had allowed Arella to place on him.

“My child, my child,” Arella told Vitas. “You are dreaming. Drink.”

He sucked at the sponge and, when finished, gasped for air. As the drug coursed through his body, a vision came to him, so utterly real that he smelled the blossoms and felt the softness of petals drifting over his face. A month after their marriage, Vitas had fallen asleep in the gardens of the estate in Rome. It was midafternoon. Slaves had served a light lunch of cheeses and wine, and he’d leaned against a tree, content—not from the afternoon sun, a perfect temperature on that day, nor the excellence of the cheeses, nor the satisfaction of being able to look around at property that belonged to him, but from the joy that filled him because of Sophia. She truly did complete him, and after far too many years as a soldier and a man alone, he was content to live a life utterly without adventure or excitement. How incredible, to wake each morning beside Sophia, to nuzzle her hair and whisper stories to make her laugh, knowing nothing more was expected of them throughout the day than a chance to stroll through the markets. With those images to comfort him, he’d drifted into sleep, only to be woken by a sensation softer even than Sophia’s hair across his face, puzzled by the colors and sweet aroma until he realized she’d taken petals and was sprinkling them over his face to pull him out of sleep.

“Have you given it thought?” she asked. “The poison?”

So completely lost was Vitas in the memory that only after long moments did he realize where he was and that the old woman was talking about something she had promised earlier. To find poison.

It was a risky promise.

The soldiers who stood guard had not stopped the old woman from draping Vitas’s head with a cloth, for the same reason that she—and others who came to gather around a husband or son or father dying a slow death—had been allowed to offer water from a bucket. The mercy it extended was also a form of torture. These ministrations lessened the discomfort, but at the same time they would lengthen his life. The victim’s choice then was simply another form of torture. Die sooner with greater pain? Or ease the pain yet suffer it longer?

But Arella was offering suicide as an abrupt escape from the prolonged agony of crucifixion. If they caught her in the attempt, she too would be crucified.

The old woman’s question brought to Vitas a knife’s blade moment of clarity.

“Yes,” he told her, still in agony over the deluded sighting of his wife and the searing memories of their last moments with Nero before Vitas’s actions had condemned him and his wife to execution. He could not endure this much longer, and Damian might be another week. “I want this to end.”

Beneath the starlight, there was a change of guards at the beginning of the next watch. The replacement guards kicked at a couple of soldiers who were asleep on the ground.

There was nothing unusual about these soldiers and their sleep. As dusk fell, with a spectacular sunset over the Mediterranean that none of the dying men gave any notice, the soldiers had thrown dice to see which ones would remain attentive on the remote chance that there would be any rescue attempt.

Among the crucified there were no high-profile political prisoners likely to be rescued—just common highway brigands and ill-favored slaves. And because of the logistical difficulty of prying spikes away from wood, taking down a man ensured such a drawn-out process that even the most sleep-drugged soldier would be roused, especially with the screams of pain that would come from the rescued.

So the soldiers who lost the dice throws grumbled, then sat with their backs against the vertical beams of the crosses—soldiers on one side telling stories and eating breads, meats, and cheeses; dying men hanging from spikes on the other.

During the change of the guards, Vitas gradually became aware of his pain again.

The old woman was gone, chased away by the soldiers at dusk like all those around the crucified men. Some would return in the morning to take away their loved ones for burial; their vigils had ended in late afternoon, when those they tended to had succumbed to one more day’s heat and finally, mercifully, had taken their last breaths. The effect of the poppy tears had worn off for Vitas, and in his agony, he felt his fingers curl against the spike that impaled his left hand. The ropes had rubbed his wrists and ankles raw; they oozed with pus and blood. His chest muscles felt torn from the weight of his body. Sand fleas tormented his skin. He was thirsty beyond any cruel sensation he had ever experienced. And he couldn’t breathe.

He moaned as he pressed his weight down on the mangled arches of his feet. It was a sound lost among the moans of the other men on the crosses nearby.

Even Jerome, large and stoic, added to the chorus with the peculiar sounds forced from his throat.

Vitas stared ahead in the darkness. Wondering about the vision he’d seen of Sophia walking along the road. Wondering about the vision and waiting to die.

It was only the sixth watch.

With the sun, the old woman returned as promised.

“More poppy tears,” Arella said. She immediately offered up a sponge to Vitas.

“No,” he said. “Please bring me water.”

“Water alone?”

“No poppy tears. No wine. Just water.”

He imagined the glorious taste of it, slaking his thirst, telling himself that the joy of this sensation would force him to forget his agony. It was a lie, but he did his best to believe it.

“I have what you asked for,” the woman whispered. “In a powder. All I need to do is dip the sponge and sprinkle the powder. I was guaranteed that after the poppy tears dull your senses, you will die as painlessly and quickly as possible.”

“Water,” Vitas said. Each word passing through his throat felt like sand. “Just water.”

“I have only one bucket,” she said. “If I empty it to carry water, all the poppy tears I was able to purchase will be gone.”

“Give what you can to Jerome,” Vitas said. “Bring me back water.”

“The poison?”

“Not yet. I’ve changed my mind.”

“Please,” the old woman said. “I watched my sons die. What you’ve experienced until now is nothing compared to the final agony. If I’d had any money then, I would have begged them to take poppy tears. I would have begged for the chance to end their lives myself.”

“Water,” Vitas said. He was exhausted, and breath was too precious to explain. Water first; then he would ask her his question.

She held the sponge up to Jerome.

The big slave shook his head, refusing.

“Take it!” Vitas snapped.

Jerome made the
ungh-ungh
sound.

Their eyes met.

Even though the slave could not speak, Vitas believed in that moment he understood that Jerome was still seeking redemption for placing a knife against Vitas’s throat. A slave would not take comfort ahead of the master or the master’s brother.

“Fools,” the old woman said. “Both of you are fools.”

Another man farther down spoke in a ragged voice. “I beg you, give it to me!”

Vitas nodded at the old woman. “Give the poppy tears to others. Then please hurry for water.”

It felt like days passed before the old woman returned with water, but the well was just down the road, and Vitas was able to watch her walk to it and back.

She offered the sponge again, and he wept at the taste of the water. Badly as he wanted more, he found the strength to turn his head away as she lifted it again.

“Some for Jerome.” No matter what mystery had caused the mute to first draw the knife, then offer it to Vitas, he had truly been a good slave and a good man.

Jerome gasped as he drank from the sponge.

Small mercies meant so much. The two of them took turns drinking until the bucket was empty.

“Now,” Vitas said. He pushed away all the pain that screamed at him from various points of his body. “Ask around. For a traveler. A Jewish woman named Sophia who is married to a Roman named Vitas. Bring her here.”

“The woman of your poppy delusion? It’s a fool’s errand. For you and for me.”

During the long, horrible hours of the night, his mind clear, Vitas had given it thought. In all likelihood, yes, his sighting of Sophia had been a vision induced by the narcotics.

But what if it wasn’t?

What if—against all odds—Sophia had survived the execution ordered by Nero? After all, so had Vitas.

What if—and yes, it was delusional hope—she too had been directed to Caesarea, as he had been?

It was certain that Vitas would die on this cross. He doubted he could make it through another day in the scorching heat, even with water. He doubted Damian would return.

If he was to die, and if there was only one chance in as many stars as the sky held that he could speak to Sophia before he died, he was prepared to face any amount of agony.

“Please,” he said to the old woman. “Just ask.”

Those were the last words he would remember speaking over the next few hours before he lost consciousness and, with it, all sensation of pain.