The Third Day (37 page)

At this, the floodgates opened. 

“A monarch must have a scepter, and a crown,” said one of the retainers. 

I heard footsteps recede into the distance and return shortly thereafter.  After a short interval, whoever it was must have been satisfied with his handiwork. 

“All hail, King of the Jews,” I heard him declare. 

“All hail,” shouted other retainers. 

One even came forward with a bucket of water, with the excess sloshing over the side. 

“We have run out of wine,” he said.  “If it’s not too much trouble, we’d like you to make us some.” 

“Hear, hear,” said another. 

Then a woman’s voice burst out.  “I will prostrate myself before my lord, just like the Amazon here.” 

We could hear her throw herself to the ground. 

“All hail, my lord and master” she said.  “We celebrate your visit.” 

Two other women joined her, and the mockery continued until the courtiers finally began to grow bored. 

“What do you recommend that we do with him now?” Herod asked as the chamber fell quiet. 

“Send him back to Pilate,” said Azariah.  “Tell him we have paid homage to our king.  He must now do the same.” 

Laughter echoed through the room as guards led the prisoner away.  We learned later that Herod then walked over to a prostrate Sharon and gave her a vicious kick in the side before launching into a couple of obscene hip thrusts. 

“She wants a lord,” we heard him say.  “Now, I will go to the baths.  When I return, we will have a small festival, and I will show her who is lord around here.” 

I felt that old familiar sense of dread.  In the parlance of my instructors at the Army War College, our plan, such as it was, had been “overtaken by events.”  I could only be thankful that the king had not assaulted her on the spot. 

Lavon and Naomi whispered briefly amongst themselves as they considered our new situation. 

“They must bathe her also,” she finally announced. 

Apparently, Herod had a fetish for cleanliness. 

“Where?” I asked.  “Will they take her back to the tower?” 

She considered this briefly and then said no. 

Sharon’s preparation would require two to three hours.  Given the king’s newfound impatience, the attendants would not want to delay matters further by escorting her all the way back to the opposite end of the palace.  Instead, they’d prepare her in the baths under the women’s dormitory, under heavy guard. 

I started to ask whether we’d be able to intercept her party, but Naomi was already thinking several steps ahead. 

“Follow me,” she ordered. 

Since it was still almost pitch-black, we crept slowly down the tunnel until I could make out a dim light about thirty yards away.  We paused.  She and Lavon whispered again, and then she motioned us forward once more. 

At that point, the tunnel broadened out and intersected what appeared to be a regularly used corridor, complete with ventilation shafts leading to the lawn above.  These admitted a faint hint of the morning sunlight, so we could finally see exactly where we were going. 

Naomi stepped into the corridor and looked both ways.  Seeing and hearing no one, she directed Lavon to cross over to the other side and to back himself into a small indentation, a relic from a section of tunnel that had been bricked up years before. 

After he was securely ensconced in his hiding place, she stripped completely and tossed me her undergarments, which I then passed back to Bryson.  Then, she draped her robe back over her olive skin in a loose and provocative manner. 

I glanced across the corridor to Lavon and quickly got the picture.  He held a leather sap – an item he picked up at the bordello while I squatted in that basket – and pointed to my leg.  I nodded and unstrapped the
gladius
, motioning for Bryson and Markowitz to take a few steps farther back. 

We waited quietly until we heard footsteps approaching.  When they had come within about twenty feet of our position, Naomi tugged on her robe to reveal more of her ample cleavage.  Then she staggered into the corridor. 

The girl could have won an Oscar. 

She gasped as she saw the soldiers and immediately yanked up her robe to cover her breasts.  She blinked both eyes twice, signaling to us how many opponents we faced.  Then, she began to ease herself backwards, as if she wanted to make a run for the baths but didn’t dare to turn her back on these strange men. 

The first of the guards took three quick steps forward.  Apparently, he was unable to resist an opportunity to ravish a stray lamb before returning her to the fold.  The other man, a bit more senior, rushed up and barked an order – no doubt telling the kid that they had a job to do and had better be getting on with it.   

Those were the last words he spoke.  Lavon swung the leather sap and caught him squarely on the back of the head.  The soldier, who wore no helmet, crumpled without a word. 

Before his young comrade could react, I held the point of my sword to his throat, while Bryson, per my instructions, managed to jam my last ampoule of Sufentanil into a vein in his foot. 

He collapsed without a peep.  More importantly, neither man left a drop of blood. 

I lowered my
gladius
and turned to face Sharon, who stood, frozen, as if her mind had not yet comprehended what her eyes were telling her. 

When it did, she rushed forward, threw her arms around me, and squeezed as if she were holding on for dear life. 

I held her as long as I thought prudent, though we really did need to move on. 

And I wasn’t the only one to share that thought. 

“We’re not yet out of danger,” Lavon insisted. 

I gently pulled away.  I continued to clasp Sharon’s shoulders with my hands, although by then, she scarcely seemed to notice. 

Instead, her initial shock at encountering us in such an unexpected spot had been replaced with an odd, almost beatific, radiance that made me wonder whether she had been drugged. 

“I have seen him,” she said. 

“Seen wh –” 

I cut myself short as I realized the obvious. 

“
I have seen him
,” she repeated, more insistently this time. 

I glanced over to Lavon, hoping he’d have an answer to this unexpected complication. 

I took a half-step sideways as he shook her gently and spoke. 

“Sharon, we’re not home yet.  Until we get there, we are all in great peril.  Do you want to go back to Herod?”  

She didn’t respond for a few seconds, but the mention of the king’s name snapped her out of her reverie. 

“I’ll never go back to that monster,” she said. 

I took her hand and led her forward.  “Then let’s do what we must to ensure that doesn’t happen.” 

She didn’t say anything, so after a brief moment, I halted and repeated Lavon’s question. 

“Are you with us, Sharon?” I asked. 

Finally, to our great relief, she answered as though she meant it. 

***

“Keep ‘em busy,” is a proven technique I learned in the Army to divert upset soldiers from troublesome thoughts, but as I turned around to look for a task I could assign Sharon, I only saw a visibly agitated Naomi. 

By now, she had put her clothes back on.  She whispered, insistently, to Lavon while she gestured for Markowitz and Bryson to pull the two unconscious guards back out of the tunnel through which we had come and to lay them in the corridor. 

They looked at me in confusion, but I directed them to comply with her wishes. 

Once they had done so, Lavon instructed Bryson to help him carry one of guards while Markowitz and I toted the other. 

“Don’t let their clothing drag the ground,” he ordered. 

We carried both men about a hundred feet until we arrived at a storage closet.  From the dust patterns around the door, I could see that it received regular, but infrequent, use. 

I glanced over to Naomi and smiled, nodding my approval at both her choice of disposal site and the remarkable stroke of good fortune that had brought us together.  She smiled back, though her worried expression didn’t entirely go away. 

The others stood out of our way as Lavon and I carried the first man inside and laid him on a stack of what appeared to be scrap lumber.  We came back out and repeated the drill with the second man. 

This time, though, Naomi blocked our exit. 

I knew immediately what she wanted.  Without saying a word, I unwrapped the cloth belt around my outer robe and signaled for Lavon to do the same. 

The archaeologist wasn’t slow on the uptake.  He started to protest, but he could see that her eyes had hardened. 

“No blood,” was her only comment. 

“I don’t like it either,” I said. 

And I truly didn’t; but we couldn’t take the chance that one of these people would wake up unexpectedly.  Some things just had to be done. 

We each wound a cloth strip around our man’s neck in the manner of a tourniquet.  I counted off several minutes and then checked each soldier for pulse or breathing.  Sensing none, I signaled for Lavon to move on. 

Once we had rejoined the others, Naomi explained that leaving evidence that Herod could trace to the tunnel could have devastating consequences for the girls left behind, though personally, I think her motivations ran deeper. 

After a lifetime of degradation and servitude, she had her first chance to strike back.  I only hoped she wouldn’t learn to enjoy it too much. 

We scurried behind Naomi through a confusing labyrinth of passageways and had gone about two hundred paces when she stopped suddenly and raised her hand. 

By instinct, I pressed myself flat against the wall and listened.  I held a finger up to my lips to warn the others, but my caution proved unnecessary.  The others understood, and were doing their best imitation of wallpaper as well. 

We heard voices and the noise of large objects being thrown, but at that moment, I couldn’t place the sound.  The conversation’s tone seemed casual, though, and after a few minutes, whoever these people were headed the other way. 

Naomi’s face didn’t reflect any real anxiety, so whatever had just happened must have been normal.  She listened for another brief moment and then finally gave the all-clear signal, directing us forward once more. 

We rounded a corner about thirty feet away and entered an open chamber about the size of the transit room back in Boston.  Stacked against one wall were piles of split logs, which proved to be our exit ticket from the palace. 

I hadn’t given the matter any thought when I had taken my bath in the Antonia, but it finally dawned on me that a furnace capable of heating the equivalent of my hometown Y’s swimming pool consumed enormous quantities of fuel. 

In the first century, this fuel was wood, which meant that a facility the size of Herod’s employed an army of timber cutters to keep it supplied. 

Naomi knew their routines.  At dawn each morning, the lumbermen fanned out across the hills to the west.  Typically, these men spent their entire day in the field, and though they occasionally dispatched a heavily laden wagon back to the palace in the early afternoon, she had never seen one return before noon. 

“What did we just hear, then?” I whispered 

“She says that a few workers stay behind to stoke the furnace,” Lavon replied. 

This gave us a window of opportunity.  We reached another tunnel, this one a broad sloping incline, and we scrambled up until we came to another stack of freshly split logs. 

“They dry here,” Naomi explained. 

I looked beyond the pile and could see daylight for the first time.  As it turned out, we had already passed through an opening in the main wall. 

Except for Lavon, this surprised the others, who had always imagined a city’s fortifications as being a single monolithic block. 

“They could seal these small gaps very quickly if they needed to,” he explained,” just like the sewer drains.  But in the meantime, servants and craftsmen who needed to go inside could pass through without interfering with the regular palace business at the main gates.” 

This wasn’t as odd as we had first thought.  

In the twenty-first century, few realized that even as recently as a hundred years before, one of the most common US occupations had been that of household servant.  These workers used one entrance; the family used another.  Their paths only occasionally crossed. 

“Herod wants his creature comforts,” Lavon said, “but he doesn’t have the slightest interest in the mundane details of how those comforts are provided.” 

***

The structure in which we found ourselves had begun its existence as a temporary storage shed leaning against the city’s main wall.  Over time, the workers had expanded it into the present facility.  Aside from the piles of cut timber, a motley collection of axes and saws leaned against the opposite wall.