David Epperson - The Third Day

They should have sent Treasury paper instead. No wonder their empire collapsed.

“I don’t know. Probably, I’d guess. Is he Roman?”

“I don’t think so,” she replied. “He’s darker than the guys in the fort, with curly black hair and a short beard.”

I muttered a curse at Lavon for running off as I tried to work out what was going on.

“Can you ask him his name?” I said.

“We’ve been through that already. We can’t understand each other, but we did get that far.”

This was doubly encouraging. Someone intent on causing her serious harm wouldn’t have cared to know her name.

Neither one of us spoke for a moment. Then I heard her say that the litter’s curtain was open. Under the right circumstances, she might have a chance to make a run for it.

She had finished her latest Olympic distance triathlon in well under three hours, so I didn’t doubt her ability to evade her pursuers — at least on open ground. But the crowded city probably wouldn’t give her the space she needed; and the real issue was where to run to .

“I’d stay put for the moment,” I replied. “I’m sure that worm in the baths had something to do with this, but I doubt he acted alone. We’ve got to figure out who is behind this.”

“Publius wouldn’t do this to me, would he?”

I didn’t think so, but then again, my aching head couldn’t be sure of anything at the moment.

“Can you ask him where you’re going?”

“I don’t know any Aramaic or Greek,” she said, “so I tried Spanish. Supposedly, that’s the language closest to Latin.”

I smiled. This girl did have her wits about her.

“And?”

“A blank stare.”

I racked my brain trying to recall the Latin that the Jesuits at my high school had tried so hard to pound into my thick head. Then, for some reason, the name of an old movie popped into my mind.

“I’ve got it. There was a film way back in the Fifties — one of those old Christians thrown to the lions flicks. You may have seen it, too: Quo Vadis — it means ‘where are you going.’”

“ Quo Vadis ?”

“Yes, look him in the eye and ask him that.”

She did so, and I heard the answer: noster rex .

“The king,” I said.

“Herod?” she replied.

Azariah, the other fellow in the litter, must have heard her, too.

“ Noster Rex Herod Antipas ,” he said. Our king, Herod Antipas .

At least part of the picture started to fall together. Word of a blonde-headed Amazon must have spread and reached the ears of the king — a monarch who had once been so enamored with a dancing girl that he had a man’s head cut off to please her.

I suppose I should have considered myself lucky for just being knocked cold.

Sharon must have realized the implications of where they were heading, too, because she didn’t say anything for a minute. When she finally spoke, she did so in a subdued voice.

“When I was in junior high Sunday school, I remember reading a passage in the Book of Acts that described how Herod had been ‘eaten by worms’ and died. I recall that today only because it sounded so gross at the time, and the boys in the row in front made such a big deal out of it.”

She didn’t say more, but it wasn’t hard to guess what she was thinking. What did the Bible really mean by ‘worms?’ Was it contagious, or worse, some nasty sexually transmitted disease?

I doubted that the society matrons of the First Baptist Church had dwelled much on that subject.

“Do you know if this is the same Herod?” I asked. “As I recall, several kings went by that name.”

“I know it wasn’t the one who killed the babies,” she said, “but I’m not sure about the others. I had no reason at the time to keep them all straight.”

“And they say history is bunk.”

I heard her laugh; not loud, but enough to know that she retained a sense of humor. This was important.

“We’ve stopped,” she said. “They’re setting the litter down.”

“Have you reached the palace?”

“No, we’re still inside the city.”

Another pause.

“It’s all right; it looks like they’re just giving the porters a break. They’re switching sides, too, so they can use their other arms.”

I considered this for a moment. “It sounds like it will take a while for you to get there, so here’s what we’ll do: I’m going to find the others, and then we can sort out what happened.”

“OK.”

She didn’t say anything else. I told her that we’d both try to keep our ear pieces in if we could do so without drawing too much attention to ourselves; but if not, we could at least leave the transmitters on, just in case. I also implied that I had more than a few bandages and a radio in my bag of tricks.

“I’m going to sign off now,” I said. “Hang in there.”

“Be careful,” she said.

My benefactor gestured to me once more, so I started up the trail and tried to conceal my sense of foreboding.

Despite what I had led Sharon to believe, I had no bag of tricks. How long it would take her to figure that out, I couldn’t be sure; nor did I know whether Herod would set to work on her immediately after she arrived at his palace.

I could only hope not, and “hope” was never a very effective plan. I had to find the others — and soon.

As I got closer to the main structure, I struggled without success to make sense of the chaos. The two assistants had pushed their way without difficulty through a mob of invalids struggling to get inside. Others, though, weren’t so lucky.

One particular unfortunate, a skeletal figure draped in rags and hobbling on makeshift crutches, pressed his way into the crowd. He disappeared for a moment, but shortly thereafter, I watched as he was hurled back and left sprawling in the dirt.

The man gestured and shouted as he struggled to sit up, and I didn’t need translation software to understand that his words would be unprintable in a family publication.

Observing this, my rescuer motioned for me to sidestep around to the eastern side of the complex and then follow him to the north. I complied, though to reach my destination, I had to push my way past a gauntlet of aggressive beggars who lined the stone pathway holding a variety of chipped and dented cups.

What they thought they could get from me, in my deplorable condition, I had no way to know; but I suppose all distress is relative.

One wretch gave my tunic a hard tug and even I struggled not to gag as I looked down and saw the blackened tumor, roughly the size of a golf ball, that marred the left side of the miserable creature’s face.

***

With all the invalids lying about, I guessed that the place was some type of sanatorium — a presumption that turned out to be at least partially correct.

As I got closer, I could see that the complex consisted of two buildings, both square in shape. The southernmost structure, where the action was concentrated, measured about a hundred feet from end to end; roughly twice the size of its northern counterpart.

Their builders had constructed the two story walls with the familiar meleke limestone. Colonnades ringed the perimeters and provided a covered walkway between the structures as well.

I followed the priest around to the back where guards admitted us into what turned out to be the administrative center for the site. We passed through an uncovered patio surrounding a small circular pool about ten feet across. There, the man instructed me to shed my filthy tunic.

I dipped my toe into the water first — I’ll admit to being a wimp when it comes to the cold — and then plunged in. I splashed around for a minute, and then climbed back out, where a servant waited with a towel as well as a clean tunic.