by Quinn, Jack
“Helmet,” I yelled, and flung my net at his head, which he did not move, actually tangling himself more thoroughly in it by straining back as he fell to the ground, dropping his sword. The
crowd was now fully animated, screaming, “Habet! Hoc habet!87”
My obvious move was to kill my entrapped opponent with trident or dagger, but I stood there holding him firmly in the net, my mind a total blank. The crowd began yelling again for the kill, a quarter-million fists jabbing thumbs in the air, screaming me to action as I stared down at Nubian who had removed his helmet, struggled to his knees, wrapping his arms around my legs as he exposed his neck for my knife.
I jerked the pugio from my belt and slashed the wrist cord to the net, pulled away from Nubian, letting my dagger slip from my fingers to the ground. The crowd was in a frenzy, screaming for a double kill, just as one of the hoplomachae loosed his spear from horseback in a low arc sinking into the back of the Nubian’s neck, out his throat, imbedding the tip in the ground beneath him, its stout shaft holding that poor man in his kneeling position beneath my net, lifeless, arms dangling, dripping blood into the scuffed sand.
I quick-stepped to my left as I turned to face the spear already airborne from the arm of the second hoplomachae, pure instinct raising my trident to slam the spear aside as it flew a hand’s width from my head.
The fickle voices in the stands screamed their delight at the attempt of a doomed man battling certain death as several gladiators ran onto the sand. My mind was filled with anger as I grabbed Nubian’s sword and long shield, determined to take as many of those brutes with me before falling under one of their lethal blades. I crouched and waited as they formed a circle, planning to move on me from all sides at once to dispatch me quickly, when of sudden, the repeated notes of a single trumpet called my assailants to halt, their attention turned to look for a new signal from the editor.
I also cast my eyes for the first time at the abominable wretch who had caused the death of my simple Nubian, as he would my own. The crowd growled in wonder at this turn of events, half of them still urging my murder, the other impressed by my tenacity. The editor was a tall man with a full head of dark hair, wearing the purple toga of the Senate, standing with outstretched arm in the sign for his gladiators to lay down their swords and let me live. The spectators continued to murmur their ambivalence until a woman with long black hair, wearing a bright saffron stolae stood beside the editor to match his signal: Tanya! Her sarcastic grin aimed directly at me, a protective arm around a seven or eight-year-old boy with a head of tightly curled orange-red hair.
“My God! Oh, my God!”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Nazarat, Palestine
3781 Cheshvan (CE 35 October)
It is not easy to be a Jew. Hard enough on our own, trying to observe the perennial dictates of the Torah, the daily prayers and rituals, dietary laws, plus countless restrictions and prohibitions. We seem to devote an inordinate time attempting to interpret the ancient dictates of religious law to exhaustion, so that it is a minor miracle that there are any hours left for profitable endeavor. No wonder we are stricken by poverty and oppression. Our lot is especially difficult among Gentiles. My first encounter of the latter was during my childhood association with Vespasian, which required a constant subterfuge with my family, particularly James and Yehoshua; then my years of total immersion in the pagan world of hedonistic Romans.
Why other religions attempt to prevent us from following ours is beyond my ken. To my knowledge we have never imposed restrictions on any other manner of worship or initiated wars against other nations because of it. When forced to associate or conduct commerce with different peoples, we are accused of sharp trading practices, usury, selling at inflated prices, monopolizing trade segments such as lending money and the sale of precious gems. Is their criticism built on their own incompetence, sloth or envy? If their complaints were successful in routing us from commerce, would they not seek to replace us to conduct business in the same way? For a race favored by Yahweh, we are certainly a beleaguered tribe. Why have our roads been laid up steep mountains when lesser, pagan nations prosper on the plains below? Where is the messiah promised in the inspired writings of our holy ancestors? When will we find relief from constant drudgery and oppression? Why do our fervent prayers and sacrifices fall on the apparently closed ears of our revered God?
These thoughts and unanswerable questions plagued my mind on my journey south through Italia and across the Mare Magnum Veinternum88 in a merchant galleon to Haifa, where I purchased a young black mare I named Nubia to ride to Nazarat. Those imponderable considerations left me for a time as I embraced my mother, first making an effort to temper her elation at my unexpected return, then calm her distress at my scared visage. Once her near-hysteria had been assuaged, though it was mid-afternoon, she insisted on preparing a meal for me, as she attempted to extract my every action during every hour of my seven-year absence, both of which, I have learned, are common traits of the female gender.
Before launching into a somewhat improvised account of my absence, Mother gave me the sad news that Father had died three years before, apparently succumbing to a lifelong weariness and his advanced age of fifty-seven years. My sister Sarah had married a merchant from Zefat where they lived with their two children. Rifka had wed a sandal-maker in Shefar’am some ten months before, who had made her with child during the previous summer. And Mary was away with Yehoshua, after being widowed by a baker in Magdala some three years previous, who had been unable to give her children.
Since I knew the truth would cause her great consternation for the remainder of her days, I explained away my absence by telling her I had been conscripted into the Roman army as a scribe to a fictitious general, who allowed me to ride from campaign to campaign in a supply wagon because of my leg and never required me to enter into battle. The scar on my face, I lied, was a great embarrassment due to the fact that I received the wound when I fell asleep on the back of the wagon and fell off onto a sharp plate on the metal road outside the city of Athens.
I had been home for six weeks feeling restless and uncomfortable. Mother told me that Yehoshua had returned from exile in Nicosia several months before and had not resumed Father’s carpentry trade, claiming he had a calling to preach the word of God. I rode into Sepphoris to see if I could regain some of the carpentry customers we had worked for in the past, only to learn that Father had the good reputation and I was only a boy then. During my long absence and since Father’s death, his customers had established other trade relationships.
While in Sepphoris, I decided to ride by the home of Yentl and Steven, with no intention of cuckolding that good man again after he gave me the honest advice that I did not take. When I saw that the house was empty, I inquired of a neighbor to learn that Steven had died some years ago and his widow had moved to a new address. I was surprised that the location specified was in a marginal, if not unsavory, section of the city, yet quelled my hesitation, spurred my mount, and shortly arrived at a square where Vespasian and his friends were wont to carouse in their youth. Obviously, the woman had fallen on hard times, and I almost continued past her humble dwelling to save her the embarrassment of my visit. That was the old Shimon, I realized, who had resumed his youthful discretion and deference upon his return to Judea. I reined in Nubia with an audible laugh, turned back to her house and gave the rickety front door a thorough beating with my fist.
The familiar feline voice from within was as bold as my knock. “Why don’t you break the walls in while you are about it!”
The portal burst inward, and that lovely ferocious Jewess looked as dangerous as the big cats I had seen on the sands. “I would break down the gates of hell to get at you, pretty woman!”
“Shimon!”
She leapt at me like the cat I had imagined, leaning down to my height, throwing her arms around my neck as I twirled her about on the threshold, screaming and laughing ourselves to tears. After a brief introduction to her daughter of fi
ve years, she escorted that inquisitive pixie next door to spend the night at the home of a neighbor with a child who was a playmate of Yentl’s daughter, Hezibia.
There was no need to dissemble with Yentl, so after a prolonged romp on her thick pallet, we lit lamps, dined on olives, bread and wine, telling each other all, my first conscious mental journey through those horrible years of enslavement, the nights of absolute terror, the forced murder of my fellow human beings, including several men in my familia with whom I had lived and eaten, commiserated our fate and contemplated suicide, minimizing the immutable blood stains on my own hands.
For her part, Steven had assembled his entire wealth and pledged his home for a journey to far-off Constantinople to purchase thousands of precious spices, glass and silverware, silk and cups of gold he planned to sell to our affluent military Roman governors and Pharisees, a last financial undertaking that would ensure his retirement and Yentl’s well-being for the remainder of her eventual widowhood. He hired fifty armed guards to protect his money from bandits on his passage east, and the caravan bringing his costly merchandise home. Unfortunately, poor, honest Steven chose the wrong escort. According to subsequent reports, once in the barren Syrian Desert, his own guards murdered their employer and disappeared with every last drachma that he owned.
Although the bankers took her home and everything in it, including her jewels and fine clothes, the one thing no one could take from Yentl was her spirit. When she found herself homeless and destitute, she submerged her pride and indentured herself to the family of a prominent Pharisee for three years as maidservant to the man’s wife. At the end of that service she had saved enough money to purchase a loom, rent a modest house and establish herself as a weaver of cloth blankets for either the Roman toga, stolae or universal robe she designed with colored trim and pleats for women. She seemed to be working long hard hours to make a living in that way, primarily because her wealthy clients, as is common knowledge, were very slow to pay.
Drinking much unwatered wine that night, Yentl and I fell to weeping like newborn babes together at our past adversity, touching, embracing, consoling one another again in violent copulation that left us panting and exhausted between brief, haunted fits of sleep.
We saw the dawn that morrow from a rear window overlooking Yentl’s littered rear plot, my eyes darting to her fair profile and the curved outline of her form through her diaphanous shift, in wonder at the kindness the intervening years had bestowed, not only upon her visage, but firm breasts and narrow waist rarely seen in a woman at the advanced age of twenty-seven years. When I left her that morning, I recall that she did not cling or ask me to return or if I would. She just smiled her knowing little grin, touched her fingers to her lips, then to mine and closed the door before I had mounted Nubia. Cantering back to Nazarat in the crisp autumn breeze, I found myself whistling. Where had that come from? I never whistled.
Yehoshua and Mary returned to our mother’s home the following day, and after effusive greetings, my older brother sat at table before the remains of his morning meal enjoying our mother’s interrogation of my whereabouts the evening before.
“I have twenty-six years,” I told her. “Is that not sufficient to enable me to run my own life without having to account for my whereabouts every hour of the day?”
“Not while you live under my roof.”
“It was to be a surprise,” I said. “I slept at a house in Sepphoris that I intend to purchase for you.”
“For me! I have a perfectly good home here,” she assured me. “Why would I wish to move to Sepphoris? Have you gone daft in your absence, Shimon? Where did you come by so much money to buy a house in the City?”
After his initial glee at our mother’s treatment of her youngest son still as a child, Yehoshua managed to extract me from the situation by suggesting that we go out for a walk to leave Mother and Mary to discuss my housing offer beyond our presence. We walked at a leisurely pace along the path to the Sepphoris road, then turned without purpose across the field to the edge of the forest where we had harvested trees for Father what then seemed so many years ago. No longer seated in my mother’s home, his long legs still oblivious to my limping gait, walking slightly before me in the warm sunshine, Yehoshua appeared as a different man than the last time I saw him by the campfire planning his escape with James and Judah of the rebellious Sicarii. His beard was shaved to present a smooth visage to the world, his hair cropped, his body had shed a good deal of its previous bulk under an unbelted robe badly in need of mending. More than his physical appearance, he seemed distracted, less the impetuous man of action of old than the contemplative individual striding ahead of me then, as though he were pondering some complex issue, until a posed question or remark brought him back to his surroundings.
“You lived all that time in Nicosia?” I asked him.
“For the most part.”
“Apprenticed to a surgeon?”
“During the first three years.”
Extracting information from Yehoshua had always been difficult, but I would rather pull the roots of an oak felled from the earth than continue in that vein. He turned the conversation before I could continue the direction of my inquiries. “I understand your wish to spare Mother the heartache of your true activities during your absence. I am deeply sorry that you were taken as a Roman slave on my account.”
“ My enslavement was no fault of yours, Yehoshua.”
“Use my name in Greek, Shimon. I have gone to some lengths to keep my old identity from the Romans.”
“Jesus.” I tried the strange appellation on my tongue, imbedding it in my mind. “I lived through it. It is behind me now.”
He stopped and faced me with a pained look as we approached the large boulder where we used to sit eating a midday meal. “How in the name of Yahweh could you survive as a gladiator, Little Brother?”
“How do you know these things?”
He sat on the grass with his back against the stone. “I have encountered Judah since my return.”
I sprawled on my stomach on the ground near his feet, my chin propped on fists supported by my elbows. “Do you see him often?”
“As long as we are sharing secrets, I am torn, Shimon.” A frown covered his brow as he gazed off into the distance. “I have been baptized in the Jordan by our cousin John, who preaches that we should confess and repent our sins, for the Kingdom of God is at hand.”
I could not suppress a smile at mention of our fanatical relation. “Does he live in the forest still, wearing a robe of camel skin with the hair turned in?”
“I sometimes wonder if God wishes people in such poor circumstances due to Roman oppression to be burdened further with guilt,” he said.
“And adherence to the strict laws of the Torah, which intrude on every hour of their lives.”
Yehoshua, Jesus, shook his head in puzzlement. “I do not entirely disagree with some of your concerns about the strictures of our laws.”
“From what I have seen, God either ignores us or has set His mind to burden our existence.”
His eyes became moist and he could not meet my gaze. “I am sick of heart when I think of what you must have been compelled to do to survive.”
I reached out to touch his bare foot protruding from beneath his robe. “Put it from your mind, Jesus. I have.”
We were silent for a time, each with our own thoughts, until I asked, “How did you spend your time after leaving the surgeon?”
“I traveled on my own, listening, learning the way.”
“What ‘way’?”
“Did you encounter Cynics in your...absence?”
“What is a Cynic?” I asked.
“The followers of a Greek named Diogenes, who lived on the Black Sea about 350 years ago. He taught that happiness could be achieved by freedom from desire, from authority, the ownership of property, and from public opinion.”
“According to James, the Commandments of Moses and scriptures of the Torah are all the laws we nee
d to observe.”
“There seem to be many confounding philosophies in the civilized world,” he said. “It is not easy for a mortal mind to find the most suitable and dismiss the rest. There seem to be useful beliefs in many precepts.”
I smiled at him. “You are beginning to sound as blasphemous as me.”
“There is but one true God, Shimon. Keeping the major laws Yahweh has inspired our holy
ancestors to lay down are the only sure path for us to gain His Kingdom.”
“With no indication of how to free us from Roman rule.”
“Would you rather enjoy an easy existence on earth, or happiness throughout eternity?”
“Why are we faced with that choice? We are here on earth, what guarantee do we have that there is a Kingdom to be had at the end of the world? How long must we wait for the promised Messiah?”
“Those are good questions.”
“So what are the answers?”
“I have not figured them out yet.”
“I know that if we do not own property or attain power, we will never be able to defy the mighty Empire.”
“Is that why you carry that deadly knife in your belt?”
“I will not be taken into Roman slavery again.”
“You are a freedman, are you not? No longer merely a Jew, but a citizen of the Roman Empire?”
“In theory.”
“You must have great wealth, Shimon.”
“Will you help me convince mother to take a house in Sepphoris?”
“She will never live in the city. Rebuild her home here or get her a place in town.”
Jesus seemed to examine my face before his next question. “What will you do with the remainder of your new wealth?”
“I may purchase my own home in Sepphoris. Or Capernaum.”
“There are many poor and starving people in towns throughout the Galilee.”
“I earned my wealth in blood and chains, Jesus. I am not inclined to give it away to
