The Silver Chalice

by Thomas B. Costain

  Adam ben Asher turned away with a disturbed shake of the head. “How can this loud-mouth make such promises?” he said to himself. “Can the children of Israel resist the might of Rome alone? It is not hard to foresee what will happen to this man. He will die with nails through his hands and feet.”

  He lingered for a moment in another corner, where a whirling dervish was displaying his weird skill to the beat of a drum and the whine of a flute-like instrument. He passed a snake charmer without a second glance and he refused to be drawn into any of the groups of eager talkers who thronged the yard. Finally he sighted the bent head of Zimiscies, the proprietor, and hurried in that direction.

  Luke had remained at the entrance. He saw Adam fall into talk with the owner and then allowed his glance to take in the confusion of the yard with the warm interest of one who loves his fellow man. He also heaved a sigh of regret when some of the phrases of the impassioned orator reached his ears. It was some minutes before his eyes returned to Adam, and he was surprised to find that the latter was still talking with old Zimiscies. Adam’s face suggested that his apprehensions had been roused by what he was learning.

  “Does he bear bad tidings?” Luke asked himself. He waited with mounting fear until Adam concluded his talk and made his way back through the crowded courtyard.

  Adam for once was at a loss for words when he reached the entrance. He gave Luke a quick glance and then dropped his eyes.

  “It seems,” he said, “that our two young men have been unfortunate.”

  “What has happened?” Luke laid a supplicating hand on Adam’s arm. “What evil has befallen them?”

  “Zimiscies tells me that a party of Arab bandits has been raiding hereabouts.” Adam kept his eyes on his feet, which he shuffled about uneasily. “For a fortnight all travelers have been warned to be on the watch. Chimham was told it would be dangerous to start out at night with only one companion. But it seems they decided they could not afford to wait. They agreed to take the risk.”

  There was a long pause between them. “And they were attacked by the raiders?” asked Luke finally.

  “Yes. It is not known what the outcome was—whether they were made prisoners or killed. One of the Arabs was caught in Aleppo today.”

  Luke’s grip on his companion’s arm tightened. “Do you think it likely that the Arabs would hold them as prisoners?”

  “Only if they saw a chance to collect ransom money.” Adam paused and gave his head a dubious shake. “The Arabs are a violent lot. We must face the truth. They are more likely to kill those they rob than make prisoners of them.”

  Luke lowered his eyes and began to pray under his breath. “O Jehovah, we bow to Thy will, knowing Thou art all-seeing and wise and that Thou hast a reason for everything. If these brave young men have been killed”—he choked with the emotion he was feeling and could not continue for a moment—“if they have been killed, then, O Lord, give us strength to bear our loss. We know Thou wilt have a reward for them. Look down on those who have been bereaved——”

  Adam spoke unwillingly. “There is a confession I must make to you. You have seen that I have no love for this man who supplanted me. For that I offer no excuse, nor is any needed. Any other man would have felt as I did. But there is something else. I cheated him. He came to me and said he wanted to buy the two camels, and I set a very high price, thinking it would serve as a starting point and that we would arrive at a fairer price before we got through. It is true that I baited him; and when he became angry and refused to bicker with me over the price, I took his money—the full amount. There is this much to be said for me: I told him to his face that I was robbing him.” He paused and then added in a grumbling tone: “Now that this has happened, it weighs on my mind.”

  “It is a matter of no consequence now. But I beg of you, Adam, my friend, cleanse your mind of this hate you had for him. To let any of this feeling remain in your heart will weigh against you.”

  Zimiscies came hobbling across the courtyard, his head bobbing with each step. “The Arab they caught had Jewish coins in his purse,” he volunteered. “He is being questioned before the duoviri now. They will use the smallest of canes, of course. The blows will be gentle—oh, very gentle indeed—but they will fall on the soles of his feet as steadily as the drip of water in an autumn shower. Tap, tap, tap! And after a few minutes of it a terrible agony will flow through his body. His feet will swell and become purple and he will not be able to stop himself from crying out.” The old man shook his head with relish. “I have watched them use the cane, and it is always the same. No victim of it can resist crying out to his gods to be allowed to die quickly. But this one will not tell them anything. No, they are tough and proud men, these Arabs, as proud as the gods of evil. He will die under the torture without confessing.”

  “Then we cannot expect to hear anything more?” asked Luke.

  Zimiscies motioned in the air with one of his far from clean hands. “The rest of them are gone with the winds. We shall hear no more. It will remain, O Venerable Teacher, one of the mysteries of the trail.”

  Luke and Adam walked back slowly to where they had camped outside the walls of the khan. “One thing is clear,” said the latter. “They did not get to Antioch. By this time Aaron may have arrived to make his claim. I think it certain now that we will get nothing out of all our mad racing and scrambling.”

  He was so concerned with the train of thought aroused by these speculations that he paid no attention when Zimiscies came out through the gate and called after them. It was Luke who returned to hear what the old man had to say.

  “I neglected to tell you this,” said Zimiscies. “The man they caught was riding one of the stolen camels. Can you conceive of such daring and arrogance? It is said to be a valuable beast, a big brown fellow with very long legs. And it was most handsomely bedecked with shells and bells of jade.”

  “Was it one of the camels belonging to our two young men?” asked Luke with a heart so heavy that he could barely formulate the words.

  The old man nodded. “There can be no doubt of that.”

  Adam continued to discuss the situation when Luke overtook him on reluctant feet. “We must do whatever we can. There can be no sleep tonight; let us strike camp at once and ride on. There can be no stop until we reach the city.”

  “Yes, we must make a last effort,” said Luke. “And, Adam, let us keep our tongues still about this. There is no definite proof yet. It would be cruel to—to disturb her unnecessarily.”

  Adam agreed with a nod of the head. The depth of emotion that Luke’s voice had betrayed caused him, however, to study his companion with some curiosity. Luke, he saw, was pale and obviously quite shaken.

  “You seem to feel this deeply,” he said.

  Luke made no immediate response. He continued to walk slowly, his head lowered, his hands clenched at his sides. “I had come to love him like a son,” he said finally.

  CHAPTER XIX

  1

  THE CITY OF ANTIOCH, viewed from the approaches to the Iron Gate, was as magnificent as Luke had promised. Behind the seemingly endless wall with its four hundred towers it was the embodiment of all the legends of the East. Here, it seemed, turbaned potentates must rule in resplendent despotism, here princes wander in disguise to find adventure and romance, here behind ivory walls the veiled houris must abound and dread demons exercise their evil powers. Deborra felt a stirring of interest as her eyes rested on the marble grandeur of the city, but the mood was of brief duration; no more, in fact, than a single moment, for she sighed immediately and fell back into the unhappy speculations that had occupied her since they turned west at Aleppo.

  Adam, who was riding beside her and striving to divert her attention by reciting a story, noticed her lack of interest. This ruffled his pride. He had fallen into the habit of telling anecdotes from the holy writings with his own interpretations and in his own words, assisting the narrative with intervals of furious piping on the ugab he carried by his saddle, an
d even lapsing at times into song. He was accustomed to attentive audiences.

  He was giving his own particular version of the story of Jonah and had reached the point where the self-willed prophet found himself in the belly of the whale.

  “Now this Jonah,” he said, “was surprised to find that the belly of a whale was not a large place after all. He had always believed it must be able to accommodate a fishing boat or two and a whole company of men like himself, but now he discovered he could not stand up straight. He could see quite well because this soft ganoofa of a whale had sludged up a lot of weeds from the bottom of the ocean that gave off a kind of light. He saw that there were small porpoises around him that would never sport around again on the surface of the water, and large jellyfish that had once been red but were now dead white from fear, and shrimps that were making a great noise by clicking their claws together. Jonah did not like the look of the place, nor the smell of it for that matter, and he began to jump around and shout: ‘I am a man and a prophet and I have still a lot of prophesying to do for the Lord. It is not meet that I should perish in the belly of a whale.’ At this all the fishes raised their heads and began to chant together:

  “ ‘To finish all his prophecies,

  He surely should not fail.

  It is not meet that he should perish

  In the belly of a whale.’ ”

  Adam came to an abrupt stop and looked accusingly at her. “You are not listening,” he charged.

  Deborra shook her head. “You are holding something back from me,” she said. “I have been sure of it ever since we left Aleppo. What is it? If you have bad news, I should be told. I am not a child.”

  Luke was riding on the other side. The journey from Aleppo, which had been accomplished without a stop for sleep, had left him in an exhausted state. Weariness showed in the tones of his voice.

  “It is true,” he said. “We have been keeping something from you. It did not seem either wise or fair, dear child, to disturb you with—with the rumors we had heard.”

  She turned and looked at him beseechingly. “What is it? Tell me, I beg you. I cannot stand this uncertainty any longer.”

  Luke looked ahead down the road and could see the Roman eagles above the Iron Gate. The telling could not be put off any longer. Adam, strapping the ugab in place with a somewhat sulky air, gave him a nod of assent.

  “It is considered kind,” began Luke, “to tell of bad fortune by indirection and by slow degrees. I am not sure this is a kindness. In any event, I am lacking in the art of dissimulation. Deborra, my dear child, we have reason to fear that there will be sad word waiting for us when we reach that—that forbidding gate ahead of us. It may take the form of the absence of those who should be there to greet us.”

  Deborra did not speak. She kept her eyes down. Her hands, grasping the pommel of the saddle, were white with strain.

  “There was trouble on the road from Aleppo. Arab raiders attacked a small party riding through the night from Aleppo. Later one of the bandits rode into Aleppo and boasted openly of their success. He was captured, and it was found that he had Jewish coins in his purse. Also, he was riding one of the stolen camels, a rangy brown male with jade bells——”

  Adam looked up with sudden intensity. “Where did you hear that?” he demanded.

  “I was so depressed that I neglected to say anything. Zimiscies followed us out from the khan and told me about the stolen camel.”

  Adam astonished them by beginning to laugh. He not only indulged in a loud burst of mirth, but he gave his thigh a resounding slap. “ ‘A rangy brown male,’ he says, ‘with jade bells.’ It is true that the camels I sold him had jade bells. But—a brown one? Luke, my good friend, the ones I sold were not brown. They were white! As white as the belly of an underbaked fish, as white as the wattles of old Zimiscies himself, as white even as that small bit of fleece up there above us in the sky!”

  Deborra’s eyes caught fire. “Adam, Adam, what are you telling us? That—that they are safe, after all?”

  “That is what I am telling you. It must have been another pair of travelers who were attacked at night and robbed by the bandits.”

  Deborra stretched out her arms on either side and pressed her fingers into their proffered hands. They rode thus linked for several moments in the silence of an intense relief.

  “My friends!” she breathed. “My kind, good friends! I shall love you all the days of my life.”

  The contentment that Adam shared with the others was of short duration. He began quickly to frown, to mutter and shake his head. When they reached the stage of the road where all the different routes converged in front of the Iron Gate, he brought his camel to a stop.

  “What right have we to be so confident?” he demanded to know, staring unhappily at his two companions. “We should have been met before this. I have no liking for this lack of attention. It is the advance rider of misfortune.”

  Deborra’s confidence was easily shaken, perhaps because her previous despair had been so deep. She looked at him with worried eyes. “Adam!” she exclaimed. “You are rolling the stone back against my heart. Do you think we jumped too easily to a conclusion?”

  “Perhaps,” he muttered. “But that is not all.”

  Adam brought his whole caravan to a halt, and the dense traffic had to divide back of them and roll by on each side of the road. This interruption was not well received. The sun-browned men, compelled to execute this maneuver, shouted insults at them as they passed. They were moving slowly because the way here became, under the best conditions, like the neck of a bottle; and now the cork had become wedged in the neck. They passed at a snail’s pace, a thicket of colored turbans nodding high above the plumed heads of the camels. Their eyes expressed anger and contempt, their lips gave forth the picturesque abuse of the East; camel men, merchants, priests, soldiers, beggars, thieves.

  “Speak to no one,” counseled Adam, leaning over toward Deborra. “Keep your hand on your purse and your eyes open, even as you listen to me. I am afraid I have been guilty of a great carelessness. I assumed we would be allowed to enter the city without any question. I never gave a thought to the possibility that your father might arrive first and win over the police. We should have halted outside and sent someone to spy out the land. It would have meant a delay, but we would have been spared any danger.

  “Your grandfather has arranged everything according to the letter of the law,” went on Adam. “Of that we can be sure. He had the profits deposited in Antioch because that removed the transaction from the control of Jewish law. Here Roman law prevails, the code of the Twelve Tables. I think we can be equally certain that the provisions of the bequest are as sound and ironbound as a centurion’s breastplate. If no one else had known of the funds stored here, Jabez could have turned the money over to Deborra without taking any other steps. But as the bequest is being contested, he will have to go into court and obtain an addictio. We know that magistrates can be bribed. There has been one recent case of that. Suppose your father has already arrived and has found that he is being forestalled. It is reasonable that he would try to enter into an arrangement—a conspiracy, rather—with Jabez and the magistrate by which he would pay them to give the decision to him. It would turn his soul inside out to do it, he would suffer, he would cry out in his anguish; but he would come to the necessity in the end. And then what would happen to us?”

  “There is sense in what you say,” declared Deborra with a serious nod of the head. “I have had an uneasy feeling about what may happen.”

  “It is a simple matter to bribe officials in Antioch,” said Adam. “Particularly the police. I have done it myself. With a little silver and a friendly smile. Now, if your father has been spreading a little baksheesh, the police will be waiting to pick us off one by one like grapes from a bunch. It seems probable that our two young men got through safely, but they are not here to meet us. Why? I think it likely they are watching rats scamper across their feet in a city prison. If that
is where they are, the rest of us may join them. The easiest way to win a decision in court is to prevent your opponents from appearing.”

  Adam continued to shake his head doubtfully. “And why is no one here from the banker to meet us? It is a courtesy he would not overlook if he still had an open mind. I do not like the smell of this at all. We shall be scooped in as we pass the gate. You, my little Deborra, may never see as much as a dinar of all that great fortune, and I may lose my camels and equipment. Nothing that the police of Antioch get into their fists is ever given up. It is an amiable trait of theirs. I know of it from long experience.”

  There was much confusion and noise ahead of them at the gate, where a squad of custodians sweated over the task of inspecting the long files of anxious travelers. They were reversing the practice of Cerberus by paying small heed to those who were leaving but regarding with suspicion all who sought to get in.

  The confusion caused by the stopping of the caravan brought one argus-eyed official down the road. He planted himself in front of Adam and barked at him furiously. “Why do you stand here? Have your brains a palsy as well as your legs, you morsel of fresh dung blown in on the hot wind of the desert?”

  Adam glowered back. “It could be,” he said, “that the great lady who rides with us has changed her mind and does not desire to enter this thrice-accursed city.”

  The custodian squinted sharply at Deborra. “Great lady?” he said. “Is it the great lady we have been watching for? Comes she from Jerusalem?”

  “It is as I feared,” whispered Adam to Deborra. “There is trouble ahead for us.”

  “Great lady or not, move on inside the gate!” cried the guard with renewed exasperation. “We will ask our questions within. You cannot stand here.”