by Tracy Groot
“The tree never mattered,” she wept. “I was playing a game! I made it important because of what I did to my son—don’t you see? It had nothing to do with his chuppah. It never did.” She put her head down and covered it with her arms and cried.
When the crying subsided, Orion spoke.
“Think, Rivkah. Please, you must think. If you were at the stadium today your ears told you the truth. It is for the order of the stonemason that I am here. Did Pilate ever mention a tree?”
She was still. Then she shook her head. She wasn’t ready to release herself of blame, but couldn’t bear for him to worry about her. Couldn’t bear for this night to be about what she should or shouldn’t have done. She had to be strong for him. Strong and the way he liked her to be.
A thought bloomed, the one she did not much think on because it was so new and so saturated with hope, and hope was something that had always ended in bitter disappointment. But with the thought came a lifting from herself.
She raised her head from her lap. “I have something to tell you.”
He studied her face, a smile growing. “This will be better, I think.” He sat back to listen.
She wiped her nose. “You have no idea.” She smiled a little herself. “You have no idea. You will not believe what Jesus of Nazareth did. Joab came and told me Nathanael’s last words, and you will not believe it.”
She told him the story of the prostitute before Jesus, how they were both on the ground while the others with the stones stood over them. She told the astonishing thing Jesus did, how he made them drop their rocks with that devastating line: He who is without sin, throw the first stone. He said it to learned ones! Respectable ones! And they dropped their stones!
“I’ve heard this story,” Orion said softly. “We talked about it one Sabbath. I thought the woman was an adulteress.”
Rivkah shook her head. “No. She was a prostitute.” She could feel that effusing hope swell to flush her cheeks. “Then he said, Go and sin no more. Orion—” Her hands worked as she tried to explain. “There are no words big enough for that. It’s monumental. We hide so much. But Jesus knew. They looked and saw the whoring, but Jesus looked past it. . . .”
The hope became a heady fluttering. “He saw much more than they did, and he made them drop their rocks anyway.” She shook her head at the astounding mystery. “He said go and sin no more and of course she did just that, she went and sinned no more, because who could after that kind of . . .” She couldn’t find the word.
“Mercy.”
She nodded. “Yes. It was mercy.”
When the look they shared lengthened into distraction from the subject, she blinked and tried to pull it back. But she thought of something else, the other thing she could barely think on for the hope it offered.
“Orion, listen to me—” She glanced at the door, and her tone dropped to a hush. “Kyria told me there might be a plan for your rescue.”
She waited expectantly, but the words did not change a thing on his face. He only looked away.
“A plan, Orion. They wouldn’t tell her, but Theron and Cornelius . . .”
His look would not listen. His look would not believe. His look was despair and determination, many things forming a hard bleakness she’d not seen in that confident face. “What are you thinking right now?”
In a voice thin and distant, he replied, “I am thinking I will never see your hair turn silver.”
“Don’t talk like that—there’s a plan. . . .”
“It doesn’t seem fair.” His eyes traveled her hair.
She crawled over to him, into his arms, and curled in his lap. He buried his face in her hair.
He held her long and he held her tightly, and she agreed with him, whispering, “It doesn’t seem fair.” How could she finally feel secure, as if she had dropped down a long-heavy load, knowing—
In defiance, she lifted her face to his, searching his eyes. “Orion, there is a plan. If Kyria of all people has hope . . .”
He began to kiss her face. Her forehead and her eyes, her cheeks and her neck, her chin and finally her mouth. He kissed her, and she him, until a sob broke from her, and he held her tight. She cried into his neck, “There’s a plan, Orion, there’s a plan . . . there has to be a plan. . . .”
The guard did not tap at the door until long after the weeping within had ceased.
24
THE SUN STOOD OVER the Great Stadium, shining hot upon the people packed in the stone tiers. Half the population of Caesarea had to be in the stands, ten thousand people thick. The ones at the top were luckiest. They couldn’t see as much blood, no, but they were ones who caught the breezes coming down northeast from the sea.
Vendors on the walkway to the public entrance sold loaves of bread for ten prutas. They offered spiced peas and roasted nuts, chunks of honeycomb and handfuls of raisins . . . tiny cups of date juice or ladles full of watered wine. They lined the walkway because Pilate had long since banned their presence from the inside arena when disputes arose over the placement of their stalls. The Circus Maximus back home had no such ban, had an entire concourse devoted to food and bookstalls and souvenirs.
Orion waited with four Praetorian guards in the public entrance because Pilate was only now settling on his cushions. There would be announcements before they led him out. It wasn’t often ten thousand people were gathered all at once, and the magistrates lost no opportunity to inform citizens of a new tax or new policy or new law or news in general.
The citizens of Caesarea took most seriously their responsibility to witness public punishment. Some came to see the blood and guts, truthfully most, but incumbent upon them foremost was their duty to witness the fulfillment of justice. The authorities also supposed public punishment to be a deterrent from any wayward inklings to misdeeds. Deterrent or entertainment, it didn’t matter. No one knew if it worked, no one cared.
Billows of wide-eyed hysteria, insane flourishes of thought capriciously seized Orion as he waited with the guards. He would soon die a horrible death, and he was powerless against it. The thoughts bade him run, tear away, crash through the phalanx of the four guards circling him.
The last billow deposited his gaze on the leather armguard of the Praetorian in front of him. The short cloak usually worn was abandoned today in favor of the sun shining off the overlapping bronze scales that rounded the soldier’s shoulders. They would look like a floating circle of gold when they came into the arena.
Then they were moving, and insane thoughts leapt. Plead, rage—do anything, Orion, you’re going to die. They moved slowly under the archway and onto the hard-packed track. They were walking past the turning post at the far end of the raceway. They walked precisely in the middle of the east-side track—he was near enough the stands to see ostrich feathers waving at flies. He saw a little boy chewing honeycomb. A little boy shouldn’t have to watch this.
He remembered the day his father gave him the tiny red charioteer.
He remembered his first chariot race.
Through the wavering heat off the stadium floor he saw the dais ahead on the right, in the center barrier, across from the governor’s traditional seat in the stands. Pilate’s bema seat had been removed from the dais. Pilate would be on his purple cushions in the governor’s box. The two figures on the dais were Prometheus and Janus Bifrons. Past the dais another figure stood in the center barrier, and he could see the flogging posts, mere sticks from this distance.
To my beloved father, from your Orion . . . hail and farewell.
He walked in rhythm with the four, their perfect steps luring his own to cadence. Five to go, four to return. Insane thoughts flourished.
Theron’s standing-up mosaic. The look of the Jewish laundress.
Rivkah . . . he looked to see, but his rhythm faltered, and the guard behind goaded him to cadence once again.
A white-clad group in the stands, those had to be the Essenes.
Ostrich feathers waving.
He could not disce
rn faces in his glimpses of the stands. He could feel his stomach screw tight like a well winch as he walked. Gods and goddesses this could not be.
Pilate on the left in his high-backed seat, flanked by servants, not meeting his gaze. It meant he was even with the dais, and the flogging posts were just beyond it; how ever did their slow march travel so fast? After halting for presentation before the governor, the circle of shining gold continued.
Prometheus announced his sentence as they passed the dais on the right.
He kept his eyes straight ahead on the starting gates as long as he could, until the circle veered right for the center barrier.
The man at the post held the scourge at his side as if to hide it from Orion. But Orion saw the dangling cords, six or seven or eight of them—thin leather strips with bits of bone and metal threaded at the ends, wiped clean after each stroke so they should not clump with blood and flesh and so deaden the effect. The most merciful scourger was he who flogged the hardest; open the back quickly, let the blood gush forth, and so hasten the death of the criminal.
Sawdust between the two posts to soak up blood. A stain would be unsightly in the games. Leather thongs at the top of each post to secure each wrist.
Pushed to his knees between the posts. Stripped bare save his loincloth. His white back exposed to the stadium. A Praetorian pulled his right wrist to the post and lashed it there with the thong. He gazed down his arm to the lashed wrist, bewildered. His consciousness wavered like the heat off the tracks, insane thoughts leaping.
The softly plump face of his mother, eyes kind and merry. A mist of lavender with the image, the color she loved so much.
Father with one hand on Orion’s back and the other pointing to a constellation. Dark starry sky . . .
“Tense yourself hard, lad.” It pricked through the black and the stars, because the scourger never spoke to the scourged. “Brace against the bonds, bow your back with all your might. I’ll give ’em as hard as I can.”
Tears leapt to his eyes. Mercy from the scourger. Mercy everywhere he turned these days. For a prostitute, for a former chief secretary.
Left wrist lashed to the post.
His breath came hard, fast, and erratic. His hands tingled—and what was this, his knees were still on the ground—not procedure. He was supposed to be suspended between the posts, knees two hand spans from the ground so he could not brace against the blows. The guard who lashed his wrists paid out rope enough to let him brace.
Muscle would be cut quicker. Mercy from the guard.
“Thank you,” he whispered to guard and scourger alike.
He bowed his back and squeezed his face shut.
Cornelius waited beneath an arch in the starting gates. He kept to the edge of the shadows, drawing back if he noticed any attention his way. It was the closest he could be to the proceedings without gaining notice. The distance made him nervous, but the schematic he had drawn of the Great Stadium clearly showed him this was the only place he could be.
He swallowed the bile that constantly rose as he watched for Orion to enter.
“Excellency, I have news . . . ,” he whispered. “It has come to my atten—Your Excellency, it will behoove you to take note of these papers—documents—to take note of these edicts.” He wet his lips. Yes, edicts. “Excellency, I have the most astonishing . . .”
He straightened stiff, peering at the far end of the arena. Here they came. Four guards, as he expected. Orion in the middle.
He wet his lips and gripped the parchments, then shuffled through them without seeing a word. He scanned the track for the hundredth time to make sure no obstacle lay between him and Pilate’s seat. He and Theron figured on five, no more. Orion could take five downstrokes. Five was plenty cruel, Pilate would be appeased. At the fifth, Cornelius would tear into the arena like a madman.
The crowd rippled to a hush when they saw the group of five enter the arena.
Rivkah and Kyria leaned forward on their stone bench, clutching one another. They had taken their seats hours earlier, placing themselves on the third tier halfway between the governor’s seat and the starting gates. They knew the Praetorium Palace was connected to the Great Stadium by a walkway through the starting gates. Surely any rescue for Orion would come from there. The distance from the public archway to the flogging post was too great. He’d take too many lashes before rescue reached him.
“Look! There.” Kyria discreetly kept her hand in her lap as she pointed out the presence of the big Roman soldier waiting in one of the starting gates. “I told you he had a plan,” she whispered.
“Where?” Rivkah said, straining to see.
“In the shadows—see? He probably has a whole cohort behind him.”
A whole cohort. “If God hears the prayers of a prostitute,” Rivkah whispered.
The five moved inexorably along the stadium floor. Marina’s tears started the moment she saw Orion. Theron pulled her close, and she wept quietly on her man. She did not see the furtive glances he sent to one particular starting gate.
“This is wrong,” Joab hissed on the other side of Theron. He glowered at the short man in the center of the soldiers.
Jorah took his hand to her lap and held it hard.
“This is wrong.”
“He did not obey their law,” Jorah whispered, and Joab felt a tear on his fist.
“He did what was right,” Joab muttered, helpless misery growing as the five approached the governor’s chair.
He did not prevent the death of Nathanael. He could not prevent the death of this one. What could he do? Tolerate it, as the Jews always did. You’d die if you raised an opinion—just look at Jorah’s brother. Shake your head and say it’s awful, go back to fishing and be glad the Romans weren’t bothering you today. The day would come when the Jews would rise again. Until then the blood of good men would spill, but what could you do? Bide your time and be patient and wait until all are united for an uprising.
“We will never be united,” Joab growled. Everyone knew why Orion Galerinius Honoratus was at the posts. Officially, because he disobeyed an order, a Roman matter. Unofficially? He tried hard to spare the life of a Jew. The man on the purple cushions didn’t try hard enough.
It began low in his throat and came through his clenched teeth. He didn’t know he had made a sound until Jorah lifted her head to stare. He rose from his seat to his tallest and planted his feet.
“What are you doing?” Jorah gasped.
“I don’t know.”
“Sit down!” she hissed, pulling on his sleeve. He yanked his arm away. He felt a heave in his chest as he watched Orion walk the racetrack. He would stand, he would not cry.
“Joab,” Theron began, glancing about at the stares coming their way. “This is not a good time to tell the world you are angry.”
“I don’t care.”
“You are not doing anything to help Orion. He can’t even see you.”
“I don’t care.” He firmed his mouth. “I never liked him anyway.”
Rivkah and Kyria clutched one another harder as Orion’s tunic was stripped from his back. The guard tossed the garment aside and took his wrist and pulled it to a post. Frantically Rivkah looked to the starting gate.
“Why don’t they come?” she gasped.
Kyria stared at the arch. She glanced at Orion, back to the arch.
The Praetorian guard went to the other side and pulled his other hand to the flogging post. He took the leather thong and lashed it tight.
Rivkah did not breathe. And the tall figure in the shadows did not move.
She lunged from her seat and clawed her way over spectators for the starting gates.
What was this? The scourger, speaking to Orion? Cornelius stared hard—they were rigging him for a mercy killing, he realized in shock. Three lashes then, no more. Three would do the damage of five. He’d run and shout on the third downstroke. Sweat sprang to his scalp. He poised, intent on Pilate’s seat in the stands. It was halfway down the tracks on t
he right, third tier up. No horse was more ready to leap from the starting gate.
The kindhearted guard and scourger did not realize their mercy jeopardized any chance Orion had at all. It was another tactical error that could cost Orion his life; Cornelius had not conceived of mercy from the executioners.
Janus Bifrons stepped forth for the invocation of the gods.
“Capitoline Triad, we invoke you this day. Attend and preside. Nemesis, goddess of . . .”
A flash of green was his only warning—he threw up his arm to block a hurtling form. It bounced back and came again.
“Where is the cohort?” the woman hissed, murder in her wild golden eyes—the prostitute from the barracks.
He snapped his gaze to the priest, then shoved her into the shadows with enough force to send her sprawling, enough, he hoped, to—
The second hurtling form knocked him against the stone arch, crushing the parchments between him and the wall. He cursed and checked the parchments, then threw the other form aside to frantically peer for Janus Bifrons—he still spoke to the sky, thanks be to the True One.
“Apollo, chosen of Orion Galerinius Honoratus, attend and preside.”
The one called Kyria shoved her face into his, screeching, “You and Theron have a plan, where is the plan?”
As if he had time to sip wine over it! Streaming oaths, he grabbed her shoulders and took a precious moment to ensure he plowed her into the other one. He whipped around to the proceedings, suddenly aware of the new attention from those closest in the stands, who looked to see what the ruckus was in the starting gates.
“Unknown god, whom I suspect to be the god of the Jews . . . I invoke you this day. Attend and preside.”
Breathing hard, papers clutched, Cornelius suddenly realized what the priest said and looked at Pilate. Yes, the prefect had drawn his head slightly to the side, he was wary; Pilate just heard an invocation like no other. But Bifrons merely shared an inscrutable look with the governor, then withdrew to his place beside Prometheus.
