[Gaius Valerius Verrens 06] - Scourge of Rome

by Douglas Jackson

  He followed the man up the steps and into a broad, open chamber. Smoke from a brazier swirled in the soft breeze to tickle his nostrils and the air was heavy with heat and the acrid scent of metalworking. The surroundings were a sharp contrast to the industrial scene that greeted him. Sumptuous hangings in vibrant blues, reds, golds and greens covered every wall, almost giving the impression of being in the centre of an enormous garden.

  This was the inner precinct known as the Court of the Women, where wives and daughters could watch the ceremonies from the galleries above. It contained four equally open secondary chambers: the Chamber of the Nazerites, reserved for a priestly sect utterly devoted to the service of God, and the Chamber of Wood, the contents normally used to burn temple offerings, but currently feeding the blaze beneath a large cauldron in the Chamber of Lepers, which was also being helped along with measured helpings from the contents of the Chamber of Oils.

  John of Gischala sat upon his throne in the centre of the room watching two of his men laboriously sawing a solid gold table apart. Two others worked to free gemstones from the fastenings that fixed them in position. Despite his impatience, Simon took a moment to study this astonishing work of art being destroyed before his eyes. It must have been three paces long and one and a half broad, with legs the length of a Roman gladius. The top had a raised border a hand’s breadth in height and formed from a single twisted rope of gold which made three continuous circuits of the surface. Cunningly worked into the inner and outer faces of the rope were layers of precious stones fixed by golden pins. More gems, fashioned into the shape of eggs, decorated the table top. Not content, the artists who created this wonder had made crowns containing ears of corn, and all kinds of fruits – pomegranates, dates, apples and grapes, all formed from jewels of the same colour as the fruits themselves – and fastened them with a band of gold to the lower part of the table. A second solid gold surface, equally elaborately decorated, served to strengthen the legs, worked in the form of lilies entwined with grapevines.

  Simon winced as the teeth of the iron saw bit into the gold. It tore great rips in the soft metal and showered dust and shavings to be collected on a curtain spread below the table. Eventually the two men laid down the saw and twisted part of the upper surface free, carried it to the cauldron and placed it inside.

  ‘It is a gaudy thing, is it not?’ John of Gischala’s voice brought an end to Simon’s horrified inspection. The Galilean waved a hand to where another four men worked with hammer and die on circular moulds filled with gold to create coins by the hundred. ‘Better to use the gemstones to bribe the Roman guards and the coins to pay my soldiers. They fight for a noble cause, but a man still needs an incentive that provides hope for the future. I hear you’ve been stripping the Upper City and minting your own?’

  John accompanied the words with a sly leer and tossed one of the coins so Simon had to catch it. Simon looked down at the shining circle in his hand and read the crude legend circling the rim.

  ‘What do you think?’ John seemed genuinely interested in his opinion.

  ‘Freedom of Zion? A fine sentiment.’

  ‘We also have them in silver and bronze denominations.’ John’s lips twitched into that peculiar mirthless smile. ‘But I so wanted a gold coin, and of course my supply is much more reliable than yours.’ The knowing look in his eyes confirmed his knowledge of Simon’s meeting with the priests. ‘They came bleating to me to stop your ravages, but I sent them away. Bleed them dry and kill them all for all I care. A merchant without wares or a priest without a temple is just another useless mouth to feed.’

  Simon was curious. ‘Does it not concern you to destroy the treasures that have been in our keeping for ten generations?’

  A dismissive shrug of the shoulders. ‘What good is treasure if it cannot help those who hold it in their time of need? But you did not come here to talk about gold, I think.’

  ‘I would discuss my assessment of our situation with you.’

  ‘Very well.’ John’s gaze drifted towards the sweating workers. ‘We will find more privacy inside.’ He led the way through a curtained door between the Chamber of Wood and the Chamber of Lepers and they passed through a narrow room – ‘the Court of the Israelites,’ John announced, as if he were showing Simon around his home. Beyond it lay a much larger space with a massive stone altar at the rear. The altar, along with a strange-looking bronze vessel the height of a man and equipped with twelve spigots, identified the room as the Court of the Priests. Priests would use water from the laver to sanctify themselves before the ritual of the daily sacrifice. The floor on all four sides sloped away from the altar to an open conduit carrying a stream of clear water – John must have managed to maintain his own supply. Blood from a recent sacrifice still dripped down the side of the altar and ran into the conduit where it drained away in a trail of smoky pink. On one of eight marble tables to one side lay the flayed carcass of a sheep.

  John saw his look. ‘The priests accused me of defiling the temple and wanted to suspend their rituals, but I persuaded them that God’s help may tilt the balance in our favour. An assessment, you said? I was most impressed with your little trick. You almost had them when you lured them inside the second wall. If only you had made me a part of your plans, victory might already have been ours.’

  Simon stared at him. Could he really be so naive as to think a minor setback and a few hundred casualties would drive Titus away? ‘We lost too many men and they did not lose enough to make a difference,’ he replied. ‘It won’t make them give up. Has the siege dyke caused you problems on this flank?’

  ‘They hardly need it,’ John pointed out, ‘when they already have the Cedron gorge. Our starving Passover pilgrims still occasionally manage to get through, but I doubt that will last. Titus has been crucifying every able-bodied man he catches whether pilgrim or not – I’m surprised he can spare the wood. You’ve heard the rumours?’ Simon shook his head and John continued. ‘Some of our escapers have been begging to be allowed back into the city.’ The Galilean smiled as he saw Simon’s eyes widen. ‘It seems the Syrian and Egyptian guards discovered a refugee trying to smuggle gold or jewels in his stomach. Now they gut anyone they catch, man, woman and child; rip them apart to see whether they contain anything of value.’

  The revelation sickened Simon. How much horror could one man take? How many of the people he’d helped to get through the Roman lines ended up butchered in the hills? ‘If it’s true we must work as hard to keep them in Jerusalem as the Romans.’ John nodded. ‘And we have to feed them.’

  ‘But I’ve barely enough to feed my men,’ the Galilean protested.

  ‘I happen to know there are two storehouses filled to bursting point directly beneath us.’ Simon dipped a toe in the cool water flowing past his feet and stared at the other man. ‘It would be a pity if the supply to the temple dried up.’ John’s eyes narrowed. ‘And of course, I’d pay.’

  His rival took a deep breath. ‘I’m sure we will find something.’

  They discussed how they could work together to meet the next Roman attack, two enemies forced to combine against the greater threat. Titus’s engineers had already begun to fill in the gorge to the north of the Antonia fort. ‘It could be a feint,’ John suggested, but Simon shook his head.

  ‘To take the city, they need to take the temple, and to take the temple they must first take the Antonia.’ They agreed Simon’s men would be allowed free access across the lines to help defend the temple walls when the inevitable time came.

  Simon was about to leave when his eyes fell on the steps of the Holy of Holies beyond the altar. ‘You said you were certain you would find the book?’

  For the first time he saw something like despair in John of Gischala’s eyes. ‘I need more time.’

  XLIV

  ‘My informants counted one hundred and fifteen thousand bodies carried in the past two weeks from a hidden gate to be pushed from the cliff into the valley of Gehenna. Not a dog, a cat or a rat su
rvives in Jerusalem, but, outwith, they gorge on its leavings. I hear stories of mothers so hungry they cut up and eat their own dead children. Families sift the dung heaps and sewers for any seed of grain that may have survived another’s ingestion.’ Josephus paused, apparently overwhelmed by the horror evoked by his words. Valerius noticed his rugged features were pale with exhaustion and his hair seemed greyer than the last time they’d met only a few days earlier. The Judaean still wore the bandage around his forehead from the stone that had struck him. He had just returned from a final mission to negotiate Jerusalem’s surrender. This time he went alone, with Titus’s agreement. Despite his suspicions, Valerius felt a certain sympathy, even an affection for the man. Time after time he’d circled the walls, bearing humiliation and insult to persuade the defenders of Jerusalem to surrender, or attempting to undermine their resolve. The lion head shook as if doing so would clear it of what he’d seen and heard and he looked up. ‘They say that since the siege began no less than six hundred thousand have starved to death.’

  Valerius watched Titus’s face for a reaction to this enormous figure and the anguish that underpinned it, but the general only nodded thoughtfully. ‘But still they won’t surrender?’

  ‘Simon bar Giora would not even see me.’ The lie came as easily to Josephus as reciting from the Book of Genesis. He’d used the time spent with John of Gischala to urge him to devote more men to search for the Book of Enoch, but the Galilean had argued there were only so many he could trust. ‘What if one of them came across the book and somehow managed to smuggle it out to a certain person?’ In the end the crazed light in the other man’s eyes had persuaded Josephus to concede the point.

  ‘Then if they will not finish it, I will.’

  ‘Lord,’ Josephus protested. ‘I urge caution …’

  Titus shook his head. ‘The time for caution is past. If they will not surrender with hundreds of thousands dead and a mountain of evidence that their god has deserted them – in fact that this god now supports their enemies – they will not surrender until the final defender of Jerusalem breathes his last.’

  What no other man in the tent knew, not even Tiberius Alexander, was that Titus had received a secret dispatch from his father the previous day. Titus Flavius Vespasian had arrived in Rome to discover himself the ruler of an empire with barely enough gold in its treasury to pay its soldiers for another two months. Vespasian needed Jerusalem, but even more he needed the fabled contents of the temple. And Titus was the only man who could give it to him.

  ‘The Antonia earthworks are complete?’ He put the question to Phrygius and Cerealis who would jointly command the assault. ‘Everything is in place, lord,’ Phrygius assured him. ‘We can have the siege towers and the rams in position by first light. The engineers have undermined the walls beneath the western tower of the Antonia …’

  ‘You hesitate, Phrygius?’

  The two legates exchanged a glance. ‘We agree it must be now. We cannot allow the Judaeans to make another successful sortie against the ramps, as they did a week ago. Every scrap of wood we have left has gone into the frame and the supports of the new ramps. Not a tree stands within a three-day march of Jerusalem, and what is left beyond is of poor quality. If we fail this time, it could be …’

  ‘Months.’ Titus finished the sentence for him. ‘But we will not fail.’ He smiled as if relieved his generals had taken the decision from him. ‘I sense the hand of the gods in this, perhaps even the hand of the Judaean god. Assemble your legionaries. I will speak to them in an hour.’

  Valerius saw Josephus slip out of the tent and hurried to join him. ‘You seem troubled,’ he said.

  ‘All these months of …’ Josephus shook his head wearily, but stopped abruptly as if alarmed he’d been about to say something he didn’t intend. ‘I mean, it saddens me to hear Titus say God has deserted the Judaeans, even these rebels who face us. John and Simon and the men who fight for them are wrong, but they are still my countrymen. Their god is my god.’ The intensity in his eyes was impossible to ignore and it was directed at Valerius. ‘I do not believe my god would allow so much death and destruction without allowing proper recompense for the sufferers, or at least those who follow them. Something good must come of this, Valerius. And someone will feel God’s guiding hand during the horrors still to come. It is my experience that God often chooses those who least expect his guidance. I believed I was that man, but perhaps he will choose another of greater resource.’ Josephus placed a hand on Valerius’s shoulder. ‘Do not believe everything you hear about me, Gaius Valerius Verrens. And if you feel the hand of God, for the sake of the Judaean people, do not disregard it.’ He walked away with the gait of an old man, leaving Valerius with a premonition of something close to dread.

  The Roman’s mood lightened when he returned to his tent to find Tabitha with Serpentius. She wore a dark cloak over a damson dress that surprised him by its richness, and her feet were encased in rugged sandals. It was obvious they’d been talking, but they stepped apart when he appeared through the tent flaps. Her eyes shone when she saw him and she approached to look into his face as if to fix every curve, angle and line so she would never forget it. She reached up to touch the scar on his cheek with her fingers.

  Serpentius grunted something unintelligible and walked out to leave them alone.

  ‘I think he’s jealous,’ Valerius smiled. ‘You have bewitched him as you have me.’

  Tabitha read the unspoken enquiry in his words. Her answering smile contained elements of sadness and confusion, and there was a catch in her voice. ‘You, Valerius. We were talking about you. In his own fashion Serpentius loves you as much as I, but in a way no woman could ever truly understand.’ She shook her head. ‘How could she? You have a warriors’ bond forged in the white heat of battle. You fought together, bled together, and it is only by God’s grace that you did not die together. But he fears for you,’ her nostrils flared and her voice turned fierce, ‘and if Serpentius fears for you, I must also. He believes each man’s life is a single thread and every fight and every wound cuts that thread a little shorter.’ She turned away so he wouldn’t see the tears that welled up in her eyes. ‘I do not wish to be your death, Valerius, but I cannot turn back from the path I have chosen.’

  He took her shoulders and gently swivelled her towards him. The softness of her hair brushed his face and he inhaled the fresh scent of spring jasmine. He remembered Josephus’s lined face and intense, pleading eyes and the touch of a hand on his shoulder. God’s hand. Fate. ‘No man can escape his fate, Tabitha.’ He stroked her hair with the fingers of his left hand. ‘It seems our fates are entwined, but for what purpose and for how long only the gods can tell. All I know is that for us there is only the moment, and we must make what we can of it.’ He led her to the blanket that was his bed and her fingers went to the brooch holding her cloak at the neck.

  Much later her fingers stroked the muscular hardness of his flat belly, playing with the dark curls of the line of hair that had so intrigued her earlier. ‘Titus revealed his plans to my mistress last night. How long will it take?’

  ‘He acts like a man who has run out of time.’ Valerius allowed the conference to run through his mind. ‘He has tried to spare his legions the worst of it, but I think he can no longer afford to hold them back. A week, perhaps less. He must have Jerusalem, no matter what the cost.’

  He felt her nod. ‘We cannot delay too long before we enter the city.

  I must reach the temple before he destroys it.’

  ‘He will do what he can to save it.’ But even as he spoke Valerius knew he had somehow misread what she’d said.

  ‘No, he has made his decision.’ Her voice burned with emotion, and Valerius wondered if she hated his friend for making her say it. ‘The reports to his father will tell a different story, but Titus Flavius Vespasian is determined there will only be one siege of Jerusalem. He will tear down this city stone by stone when he has taken it. He has said he will leave only such wal
ls as a single legion might use as their camp, and three towers, Phasael, Hippicus and Mariamme, for their watches.’

  Valerius thought of the magnificent buildings he’d seen on that first day when the Tenth set up camp on the Mount of Olives. Was it really possible Titus would destroy everything? The answer was yes. The legions had already levelled half the city during the siege. In what seemed another lifetime, Titus had called the temple a fortress within a fortress within a fortress. To leave it intact would be to present the Judaeans with a symbol of their indefatigability as a people and as a religion. A focus to which they could return and nurture the bitter taste of defeat, their hatred of Rome and their hopes for freedom. A symbol to hold and defend. Legends would spring up about the original defenders and those legends would spawn new heroes. No. The truth was that Titus couldn’t afford to spare the temple, any more than the Hasmonean Palace, or any other building that reminded the Jews there was a time they called Rome equal.

  ‘Then we leave in the morning.’ He drew her to him. ‘We will spend the day with Lepidus and the Tenth, discover what we can of the situation in the Cedron valley. You understand what awaits us there? Serpentius has told you?’

  ‘I am ready.’

  Rather than the direct route across the wasteland of Bezetha, Valerius, with his borrowed Judaean robes in a roll behind his saddle, took Tabitha and Serpentius in a wide arc. The reason was that he wanted to look upon Jerusalem from where he and Titus had studied it nearly six months earlier. The fighting had left more than half the city little more than a barren wasteland pockmarked by small piles of rubble. How much blood had been spilled since? How many had died?

  And more blood was about to be spilled, for even as he reined in by the Caesarea road more men were already dying. The final attack on the Antonia fortress had begun.

  Throughout the night the air had shaken to the diabolical heartbeat of the rams thundering relentlessly against the walls of that mighty citadel, the key to the even mightier citadel of the temple beyond. In the airless darkness beneath the Antonia’s walls Roman engineers hacked at the rock and the dry earth to leave a gaping void. They worked quickly for fear of counter-mining by their Judaean counterparts, who were agile as rats in their own tunnels close by.