by Chuck Dixon
Yasak ben Zakai was chief among the masters here and the only one who remained standing. If his god meant to take him today then so it would be. He squinted up into the sky for a sign that this might be his time and saw only early morning sky with not a cloud in sight. It was not thunder, then. He turned to the west, in the direction of the Roman camp, and saw a gray cloud rising above the top of the table of raised land. It rose thick and dark and brought an oily smell toward them on the wind.
The slaves and their guards and foremen rose to their feet and gazed at the cloud. They spoke low, trying to divine its meaning. Was this something the Romans caused? The cloud continued to climb into the sky, even as the thunder died. More sounds reached them, sharper like the cracks of a whip. Then they too died away, and all was silence.
Yasak ordered one of his cousins to run to the Roman camps and see what was happening. The man looked at him with whites all about his eyes. Yasak picked up a stone and flung it at his cousin who turned and ran to the quarry opening to the road. Yasak climbed the ladder to the watchtower where two more cousins stood guard. This vantage point offered him nothing but a view of the roadway where it turned away down the deep canyon to the exit where the foreigners’ camp lay. He could see his cousin trotting reluctantly away and finally out of sight around the curve.
The slaves were driven back to work, the more experienced to use hammers and mauls to cut and shape the uniform blocks the Romans desired for their fortress. The less skilled, the new arrivals, to haul slabs for cutting and to fill baskets with gravel to clear the field of scree.
It was dangerous and punishing labor and injuries were a daily occurrence. Many slaves were killed or crippled and had to be done away with. Thus the quarry needed new laborers constantly. Even with the high price of human flesh, the Zakais made a healthy profit selling to the occupiers. These Romans seemed to be building constantly and consumed stone and brick and even gravel with an insatiable appetite.
The sun was rising and the shadows receding from the cut of the quarry. The full heat of the sun would bake the western rock face until later in the day when it moved to the eastern wall. Atop the open watchtower, Yasak took the full brunt of the sunlight on his face. He wiped his brow with a cloth to remove the sweat from his eyes.
He blinked at the place where the road turned in toward the quarry. A figure moved there. To Yasak’s astonishment, it was a woman. She wore black armor and carried the banner of the Roman legion. The polished horse affixed to the top of the crosspiece caught the rays of the sun.
Behind the woman came two men. They walked easily, boldly. Each carried in his arms a black rod that was too short to be a spear. Yasak turned in the tower and called to his cousins and others to take up arms. They answered his call with swords and lances and rushed to the foot of the tower to defy the intruders standing where the canyon widened, well out of range of even their slings.
The woman, lewdly bare-legged and wearing her black hair free to her shoulders like a whore, stood with the Roman banner upright in her hand.
“We have come for your slaves,” she called in stilted Hebrew. “We have slain the Romans. We will spare you only if you free the slaves you hold.”
The overseers glanced at one another in consternation. Who was this bitch, and what was she saying to them? They were Jews, but most of them spoke only the local dialect of Aramaic, and only knew the old language from the words sung to them in the Holy Days.
Yasak’s father was a man of God and letters and insisted that he and his brothers learn the old language.
“You are mad, woman!” Yasak called back in kind. “The Romans will see you nailed up for this intrusion!”
“The Romans are dead,” she called back. “As you will die unless you free all within this place.”
Yasak repeated her words for the others and, after a moment to consider the absurdity of it, all barked with laughter.
“You will die,” the madwoman said when the men recovered from their mirth. “And I will choose the first to suffer my wrath.”
With that, the woman raised her empty hand and pointed a finger at the clutch of armed men gathered before the watchtower in a ragged line.
“This one!” she called.
A peal of thunder sounded and, simultaneously, one of the men, a second cousin to Yasak, stumbled backward to fall to the ground. He lay there for a moment, his legs kicking and his life’s blood pumping from a hole in his chest. Then he was still.
“Now that one,” the woman called with hand raised.
A second sharp crack, and another in the rank of armed men dropped as though struck with an ax, his arm near torn from his body and a spray of blood splashing over those close enough. The men parted in terror from their fallen cousins.
Yasak looked from the two still bodies bleeding out in the dust to the three strangers still standing on the roadway. The two men held their strange black rods to their shoulders. Wisps of white smoke rose from the rods as though they each contained a hidden flame.
“Release your captives!” the woman called. “Lay down your weapons and step aside, and no more will die.”
“It is a trick! She is a witch!” Yasak called to the men quailing below. “Take her, you cowards! Take them all! They are few, and you are many.”
Yasak’s throat closed tight as he saw the brazen woman raise her hand to point a finger directly at him.
The Rangers and Bat walked forward into the open floor of the quarry.
After Chaz’s shot took most of the head off the loud guy in the watchtower, the rest of the tough guys threw down their weapons and fell to their knees. They were there, asses up and heads down, and crying like schoolgirls.
Lee and Chaz kicked a few to their feet and hustled them against a wall of the escarpment away from their weapons. The men kept their gazes on the ground, terrified of even looking into the faces of their tormentors.
“These fuckers were badasses when it came to pushing slaves around,” Chaz said, slamming a boot into the back of a leg to bring a weeping man to his knees.
“Down, pussies!” Lee said and motioned for the others to do the same. They dropped as one. The Rangers sniffed at an ammonia stink. These dudes were pissing themselves with fear.
Chaz walked beside Bat Jaffe into the heart of the quarry. The slaves, well over a thousand men, stood all about as though too riveted to react. All that could change in a heartbeat. Chaz had his M4 easy in his fists, but his eyes were wary. It wouldn’t be the first time he had been attacked by someone he came to rescue. People reacted every which way but sane when there was blood being spilled.
Bat raised her arms. She didn’t need to. She already had, for a variety of reasons, everyone’s attention.
“You are free!” she called in the language she hoped at least some of them understood. From the look of them, they were not all Jews. She saw black Africans and a few men with blond topknots. Certainly, there were Greeks and Arabs and who-knew-what-all here too.
“The Romans are gone! Your masters are cowed! We have come to set you free!” She saw some of the men repeat her words to the others, who in turn spoke to others.
“Who are you to free us? By whose authority do you do this?” A rail-thin man with a mane of white hair stepped forward.
Bat was unprepared for this. She didn’t expect to have to answer questions. She turned to Chaz for help, but he was standing transfixed and searching the faces of the men about them.
“They’re your people, honey,” Chaz said.
“What does it matter to you?” she said, turning to the old man. “You are free! Go and be free!”
“You give us a gift that is not yours to give. Only those who enslaved us may free us. We may not simply leave this place. Without their word that we are free, we will be hunted like rabbits,” the old man said, and it was repeated around the men ringing them in.
Bat was losing ground here. This guy was reminding her of her Uncle Joel. And her Uncle Joel loved to argue.
“What’s the holdup?” Lee asked, striding to her side. “We’re on the clock here, baby.”
“They say we don’t have the authority to free them,” she said with a shrug.
Lee plucked the staff of the Roman banner from her hand and held it over his head.
“Who has the authority? I have the fucking authority!” Lee shouted. All stood around blinking at him uncomprehending.
He raised his M4 in the other fist and let rip with a long burst on automatic. The men flinched and wailed, eyes round in terrible wonder.
“I am the baddest son of a bitch in the valley!” he roared. “Now get your asses moving!”
The slaves ran now in a rush for the quarry opening. They eddied around the Rangers, eyes averted in fear.
“You just have to know how to talk to people,” Lee said, turning to Bat.
“Can’t get my head around this.” Chaz watched the quarry slaves hare off down the roadway. Some fell to their knees and bounced right back up to sprint away.
“All those Sundays in church singing and listening to the pastor,” Chaz said mostly to himself. “And the guy that all that singing and preaching was about was standing right here in front of me. I mean, I might have been looking right at the son of God.”
Lee patted his brother Ranger on the back as Chaz let out a sigh.
“Let’s hope it’s a long time before you see him again.”
The two men and the woman moved out at a trot to follow the fleeing mob, leaving behind the slaveholders to piss and moan.
35
The Fury of the Tetrarch
Valerius Gratus had his most plush couch brought into his office. His upright chair had become too uncomfortable over time, so he now reclined as he officiated the duties of a provincial prefect.
That was not the only change in his palace. No longer was he attended by his staff of young slaves. Gratus had lost all interest in pretty boys and sold them to a slaver, who took them away weeping in their new chains. The prefect’s daily needs were now seen to by soldiers of the Twenty-third, giving his residence a martial air that he found comforting. And the prefect was concerned only with comfort these days.
He lay alone in his office except for the chinless wonder serving as his lictor in Titus’s absence. The spotty clerk was pestering him for decisions on an endless list of tiresome demands and entreaties from local Roman officials and Jews alike. Merchants. Cheats. Pimps. Damn them all.
Gratus found it all too tedious. He wished only to lie in the dark and indulge in his own private Elysium. Was he a slave to be burdened? Were the troubles of his subjects his troubles to share?
He lay wrapped in a thick woolen cloak despite the heat. He was always cold now, it seemed. His skin was sallow and clung to his bones and shrinking muscles like damp paper. He ate nothing but honeyed sweets and drank nothing but leaded wine. His bowels troubled him, and he struggled to void them. His teeth were loose in his gums, and his mouth seeped as much blood as spittle.
Like all vices, there was a price to be paid for embracing the charms of the mysterious morphea. More like embracing a diseased whore, Gratus thought bitterly. Yet he drank a portion of the wine each night, even as he despaired of his shrinking cock. As much as the white-haired stranger vexed him, he looked forward to the man’s return with a fresh supply of what had become the single focus of his life.
The pimpled lictor droned on and on, but the words made no sense to Gratus. To his ears, it was like the mewling of an obstinate child or the cawing of a seabird. He lifted himself from the couch to tear the sheet of paper from the startled lictor’s hand.
“Later for this!” he shouted. “Leave me! Leave me and stay away until I call!”
The lictor’s lips quivered as he turned to go. Was the man going to cry?
“But pour me another draught of wine before you go!” Gratus called to his receding back.
The lictor sniffed as he tilted the jar to fill the prefect’s cup.
“Shake it first, you horrible excrescence!” Gratus roared.
The lictor replaced the cork and gave the jar a vigorous jiggle to more thoroughly mix the lead powder with the potion.
“Now, away!” Gratus muttered once the cup was filled to the brim.
The lictor departed sullenly from the prefect’s office. The supremely annoying man returned in what Gratus believed at first to be an instant.
“Honored Prefect, you have a guest!” the lictor brayed.
The prefect noted that his office was in shadow now, no sunlight showing through the gaps in the drawn curtains. He rose with some effort on one elbow to find the empty cup still in his hand. A broad red stain had dried on his robe. How long had he slumbered? He realized that the lictor was still speaking. Gratus looked up to see a second man entering the room. A Jew with a long braided beard, dressed in fine robes of black linen trimmed with yellow silk. He wore atop his oiled hair one of those peculiar hats that the wealthier Jews favored. Gratus was so fascinated with how the contraption remained balanced atop his visitor’s head that he only heard the last of his lictor’s pronouncement.
“...envoy of the Herod Antipater, tetrarch of Galilee and Perea, the most honorable Channah Samarius.”
The Jew strode boldly to the couch where Gratus was levering himself to a seated position with some difficulty. Two more Jews, hard men from the look of them, entered in the wake of the first and shoved the lictor aside. The prefect wondered idly where his personal guards were at the moment.
“Herod has received word of events within his kingdom of which he was not advised,” this Channah said, eyes blazing from beneath dark beetled brows.
“Is this so?” Gratus said.
“His Highness has learned that you are the author of this event. He has sent me as his envoy to receive your explanation for this flagrant violation of the trust between Tiberius Caesar and the ruler of these lands.”
His Highness. Gratus stifled a chuckle. This upstart Herod, as his brother and his father before him, ruled at the sufferance of Rome. And a brittle rule it was.
“Inform me of the details of this betrayal please,” Gratus said and made an effort to stand before the man. He was gratified to find that he was a head taller than this upstart Jew.
“A Roman army has taken the young men from the city of Nazarea,” this Channah huffed. “They have been marched north to be sold into bondage, and the proceeds used to fill your coffers.”
This damned Herod had spies everywhere. Was there a traitor in the prefect’s palace? Or within the Syrian legate’s command? More likely the Nazarenes sent word to Herod begging for his mercy.
“I acted within the bounds of my own aegis. I was under the belief that Herod had been informed of my actions.”
Was that true? Did the stranger ever mention the tetrarch Antipas by name? Gratus could not recall. In fact, he could not recall the white-haired foreigner ever mentioning by whose authority he acted.
“He was not informed,” this Channah seethed. “He knew nothing of your actions. He wishes to know the cause of this. What gave the prefect cause for a reprisal such as this? Nazarea has been a peaceful place. It has raised no hand against Rome.”
Gratus hesitated to answer. What reply would make sense? He had no actual cause for taking the captives. He sighed with visible relief that he had defied the stranger’s wishes and not had them executed.
“Will you answer?” the Jew thundered up at him.
“It is a Roman affair and does not concern the tetrarch,” Gratus sniffed.
“His Highness enjoys a brotherly friendship with Caesar Tiberius. It is a simple thing to discover if your words are lies and find the truth behind the seizure of Herod’s subjects.”
That was true. Herod was known in Rome and, for a Jew, well thought of by many in the imperial house as well as in the Senate. And many powerful Romans were either in business with the wealthy bastard or indebted to him for loans. Though in theory, the prefect of Judea was the reigning power in the pr
ovince, Herod held the true power with the aid of influential friends in every corner of the Empire.
Gratus realized with a chill that owed nothing to the night air that he was in over his head in waters where predators glided. He had a sudden mad image of blood-smeared teeth clotted with raw flesh and shuddered at the thought.
“I have acted in error,” Gratus said, forcing a smile that was more repellant than reassuring.
“And how may I tell his highness that you will make good this error?” The Jew smiled most condescendingly.
“The captives are at a legion castra in a village belonging to the family of Sasson ben Zakai.”
“Was it to him that you sold the Nazarene men?”
“Yes. They work cutting stone in his quarries. And are well cared, for by all accounts.”
“You will return the Nazarenes to their homes. You will surrender the gold you made from the sale of those slaves to Herod. Only then will his highness be satisfied. He will see no need to trouble Caesar with this misunderstanding.” The Jew’s smile almost reached his coal-black eyes.
“And how will I make repayment to the Zakais?” Gratus said, struggling to keep a wheedling tone from his reply.
“That is not the concern of the tetrarch.”
“I will send a runner in the morning,” Gratus said in a small, child’s voice and sank back on his couch.
“You will send a runner now. Followed by soldiers to meet the returning caravan in order to escort them safely back to their families under the fullest protection of the Roman eagle that you can provide.”
This Channah turned then on his heel and insolently departed the prefect’s office without a word of farewell.
Gratus lounged on his couch, bathed in sweat. He looked up to note that the envoy’s two servants remained behind. They stood as silent witnesses to ensure that the prefect made good on his promise. His thoughts whirled as he struggled to retrieve the name of his acting lictor.
