David Epperson - The Third Day

This made sense to me. I guessed that each one stood about forty feet above the rest of the fortress. Unfortunately, our circumstances were unlikely to afford us the opportunity to take more exact measurements.

As soon as we stopped, Publius called the men to attention and gave a brief speech, which, from his troops’ demeanor, sounded like congratulations for a job well done.

Their day wasn’t over, though. After being dismissed, the soldiers first stacked their shields on a rack along the front wall, where specialists inspected each one for damage and made chalk marks on the ones needing repair.

As they did this, I helped Sharon off the wagon; then Lavon and I carried stretchers bearing the wounded Romans to a shady spot. Attendants took them from us at that point and toted them inside — presumably to what passed for a hospital. I wasn’t sure what I could do, so I made no effort to follow them.

After a short break for water and a bite to eat, the soldiers set to work preparing their armor and weapons for whatever lay next, turning the courtyard into a veritable hive of industry.

Slaves brought wire brushes and joined the soldiers in scrubbing off the gore and the bits of rust that had accumulated earlier that day. Once they had finished this, others polished the armor with cloths until they could see their own reflections.

Additional servants turned grindstones as the soldiers re-sharpened their own swords, with each man stepping back occasionally to test his weapon for a razor-sharp edge; while still others applied oil to leather straps and repaired torn cloth.

I glanced over to Lavon. “Brings back memories, doesn’t it?”

As lowly recruits, both of us had spent hours after long training marches cleaning our rifles and equipment before we were allowed any rest.

***

Publius didn’t stick around to watch. His men knew what to do, and he had other tasks to complete. Just after he dismissed the soldiers, an older man in a white tunic stepped out from the shadows.

The centurion saluted him and then followed him back into the fortress — no doubt to give a brief summary of the day’s activities before spending the remainder of his evening producing a report, in triplicate.

“Do you think that’s the governor?” asked Bryson.

Lavon shrugged. He had no idea what Pilate would have looked like. No one from the modern world did.

We all pondered this for a moment before Sharon noticed an object at the far end of the courtyard. A cylinder, about eight feet tall and roughly the diameter of a telephone pole, had been planted in the stone floor. Two short chains hung from the top, with a metal shackle at each end.

“What’s that?” she asked.

“A place none of us want to go,” I said.

“Flogging post,” said Lavon.

She stared at it a bit longer and then turned back to face us.

“Was this the place?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” said the archaeologist. “Some scholars say Jesus was scourged here; others say it happened in Herod’s palace. The truth is nobody knows for sure.”

“I guess we’ll find out soon enough,” replied Bryson.

We watched the soldiers work for another half hour before a young man wearing sandals and a plain brown tunic approached and beckoned for us to follow. He led us to the southeast corner of the fortress and started up a flight of stairs, taking the steps two at a time all the way to the top.

Except for Bryson, we all made it with a minimum of huffing and puffing. It had to be a test, though of what I wasn’t sure; nor could I know whether or not we had passed.

The kid waited patiently at the top landing for the Professor to catch up before leading us down a short corridor and inserting a key into a thick wooden door.

He gestured for us to go inside.

The room was larger than I had expected — about fifteen by thirty feet. The walls were built of the same meleke limestone as the rest of the fortress, with thick cedar beams running across the ceiling. Four windows, each about three feet wide, faced the Temple courtyard to the south, while two narrower windows opened to the west, giving the room a red glow from the late afternoon sun.

The furniture was sparse, but functional, as I would have expected in a military establishment. A large bed, wider than king-sized by half, sat in the northeast corner of the room, away from the windows. A wooden table, surrounded by six crude-looking chairs rested in the center.

“What’s that?” Sharon asked, referring to a bucket on the floor in the far corner, opposite the bed.

I couldn’t help but laugh. “Piss pot,” I replied.

She blushed. “Oh.”

“Go, if you have to. We’ll all turn the other way.”

She was about to speak when the young man said something to Lavon.

It must have been about food, because after hearing the archaeologist’s response, the man shouted down the stairs. A few minutes later, two slaves appeared carrying warm bread and a jug of wine, followed by two more servants holding five metal goblets and a stack of blankets. The men deposited their cargo without speaking and immediately turned for the door.

After the kid left, I motioned for everyone to gather around the table for a de-brief but quickly realized that it was hopeless. Each of the others raced for a window, where they stood mesmerized by the activity in the Temple courtyard below.

From our vantage point near the top of the southeastern battlement, we could see white-robed priests — drawn by lottery earlier that day — as they completed the evening offering and prepared the Temple for the night.

Each man was dressed identically in a white linen tunic, with a red belt and white linen, turban-like headgear. To our surprise, the priests went about their tasks barefoot.

Bryson edged himself out and around the sill of the far left window in an effort to get a better view.

“Fascinating,” he muttered to himself. “Utterly fascinating.”

It most assuredly was.

The Temple itself faced to the east and was situated slightly south of center on the broad rectangular Temple Mount, whose flat white surface covered about thirty five acres. From our position, only a few feet below the Temple roof, the setting sun highlighted the gold edging in a spectacularly beautiful way.

Lavon peered straight down and broke out in quiet mirth.

One of his old college professors had published a paper asserting that the Antonia was an integral part of the Temple complex, while a colleague had just as emphatically maintained that the fortress was situated about six hundred feet to the north, connected to the Temple only via breezeways.

In the manner of so many obscure academic quarrels, their dispute had become so bitter that despite having offices in the same building, neither man spoke to the other for more than two years.

Both of them were wrong.

Herod’s engineers had been clever, we could see. They had located the south wall of the Antonia about thirty feet from the Temple Mount’s perimeter. A system of gates and bridgeways permitted the easy flow of soldiers and materiel from the fortress to the Temple, but would present an almost insurmountable obstacle to anyone trying to get through the other way.

“They appear to know what they’re doing,” I said — and not for the last time.

Lavon nodded; then he looked up and saw that Bryson had eased himself dangerously close to the window’s edge. To make matters worse, we could see the bright red LED on his camera.

Lavon coughed. “Ahem; Professor, you might not want anyone to see you with that thing.”