Iris Johansen - Eight Days To Live

The field of blood…

IT WAS AFTER MIDNIGHT, BUT there was no way she was going to be able to go to sleep, Jane realized. She was too wired. Too much coffee. Too much adrenaline.

And she didn’t want to be alone. She wanted to talk, to discuss, pour out all she had learned and brainstorm. She started to reach for her phone to call Eve or Jock, then stopped. She should be considerate and let anyone who could sleep do so.

To hell with it. She quickly dialed a number.

“Trouble?” Caleb asked.

“No, I can’t sleep, and I want to talk to someone, anyone.”

“And I take it I’ve been chosen.”

“I didn’t want to wake Eve or Jock.”

He chuckled. “And I don’t matter.”

“Yes or no?”

“Where? Your room or mine?”

Too intimate. “Neither. I’ll meet you in the courtyard in five minutes.”

“I’ll be there.” He hung up.

She went to the bathroom, washed her face, and ran a comb through her hair. Then she was out the door and running down the grand staircase.

Caleb was standing by the fountain in the middle of the stone-paved courtyard. He was dressed in dark trousers and a white shirt open at the throat. The bright moonlight caught glints of the silver threading his temples.

She stopped short as she came out the front door.

He was waiting for her.

Of course, he’s waiting for me, she thought impatiently. Why had the sight of him brought that sense of alarm?

Because she had the strange feeling that the waiting was not just for this night, this moment.

Nonsense. Her head was still swimming from hours spent on the computer.

“You can’t change your mind,” Caleb said. “You dragged me from my bed and didn’t even flatter me that you did it because I’m special.” He smiled. “In fact, I got the opposite impression just as you wanted.” He sat down on the edge of the fountain and patted the stone rim beside him. “Now come and talk to me. After all, I did risk my life wandering around this courtyard in the dead of night. MacDuff’s guards don’t like midnight callers.”

She hadn’t thought about the security guards. She had only wanted to avoid the intimacy with Caleb that always disturbed her. “They challenged you?”

“It doesn’t matter. I handled it.”

She started across the courtyard. “I didn’t mean to cause a problem. I just thought it would be best if-”

“I know why you wanted to meet me here. It’s all right, Jane. I take what I can get.”

“And most of the time you take more than is offered,” she said tartly.

“Not from you.” He suddenly chuckled. “Well, not usually. For instance, you see me patiently waiting for you to tell me what you learned from those dozens of Bibles Jock brought you.”

Waiting. Again that word brought a frisson of uneasiness.

She instinctively lifted her shoulders as if to shrug it off. “Actually, I found out more from the Internet. April first is supposed to be Judas’s birthday, hence the Offering.” She sat down beside him on the fountain’s rim. “And you’d be surprised how many scholars have been intrigued by Judas over the centuries.”

“No, I wouldn’t. The greatest betrayal of all time. Greed. The struggle of evil and good. It would fascinate most sinners and angels alike. For a scholar, it would prove irresistible.”

“But most of them ended up with suppositions and theories. There’s just not enough written about Judas. In Mark, Judas is an enigma. His entire purpose in Mark’s writings is to hand over Jesus to the authorities. He has no character beyond the act itself and no clear motives.”

“Thirty pieces of silver.”

“That wasn’t mentioned in the Gospel of Mark. It was all very vague. It’s Matthew who talks about the money Judas received for the betrayal… and the field of blood.

“Field of blood?”

“After Judas returned the money he’d received from the priests, they decided they couldn’t put it into the treasury. It was blood money. So they decided to buy a potter’s field in which to bury strangers. They gave the silver to the owner of the field.”

“Then that’s the end of the story of the Judas coins. The chances of the pouch of coins still being kept intact is practically nil.”

“It would seem that’s true.” She frowned. “But Roland must have known all this. And he’s certain those coins weren’t scattered to the four winds. Part of it is because of all the research he’s done over the years, but it’s mostly the rumors and stories handed down through the centuries in Hadar’s cult.” She nibbled at her lower lip. “Is he right?”

He was studying her expression. “You tell me.”

She shook her head. “I don’t know.”

“Perhaps there was no field of blood. Maybe Matthew just wanted everyone to think that the priests had realized what a sin they had committed. After all, those disciples were only men, and memory fails. I understand that many times their stories didn’t agree.”

She nodded. “Luke wrote in his Gospel and the Book of Acts that it was Judas who bought the field with money he’d received as reward for his wickedness.” She made a face. “And according to him, Judas didn’t hang himself, he fell headlong in the field and his middle burst open and all his bowels gushed out. When the people of Jerusalem heard of it, they began to call the field Akeldama or Field of Blood.”

“Very different.”

“Yes, even the terms for the field aren’t the same. Matthew referred to it as agros of blood because it was bought with the price of the blood of Jesus. In Acts it was referred to as chorin of blood because Judas supposedly committed suicide there. But they both talked about a field of blood. And a couple generations later, Papias wrote still another version. According to him, Judas died of a painful, shameful disease on his own property. The stench of him still lingers over the land to this day.” She looked at him. “Another field.”

“What are you saying?”

“I’m saying that no matter how the stories change, there’s always a field of blood.”

“But no other mention of the coins.”

“They could still be there.”

His brows rose skeptically.

“It’s possible.”

“If it even exists.”

“The tour guides in Jerusalem say it exists. It’s on their regular tour.”

“What?”

“Or what they claim is the Field of Blood. It’s a field south of the city. But there appears to be some doubt among the scholars that their potter’s field is the actual place mentioned in Matthew.”

“Since there’s controversy about the field’s existence, that doesn’t surprise me.”

“And if it did happen, we don’t actually know what happened to the coins after they were given to the owner of the field.”

“I doubt if he’d treasure a traitor’s ill-gotten gains.”

“But we don’t know . Unless Hadar’s tablet can tell us something.”

“Or Caiaphas,” he said quietly. “There’s always that possibility, isn’t there?”

She stiffened. “What?”

“Who would know better than the high priest?”

“I told you that it was all guesswork. There wasn’t any more mention in the testaments about Caiaphas’s disbursement of the thirty shekels of silver.”

“Not in the testaments. By the way, did you verify that Caiaphas was the high priest’s name?”

She didn’t speak for a moment. “Yes.”

“And it didn’t strike you as curious that you already knew his name?”

“I’m not a heathen. I could have run across it somewhere.”

“Stop fighting, Jane. You know where you ran ‘across’ it. Eve said you went into denial after your experience with dreams of Cira years ago, but it’s too dangerous to do that now.”