David Epperson - The Third Day

It bleated softly.

“A cute little critter,” I heard Markowitz say.

“Don’t get too attached to it,” Lavon replied. “In less than an hour, you’re going to be cutting its throat.”

“Me?”

This was a surprise. I had thought the priests handled that end of the business.

I couldn’t help but chuckle at the picture forming in my mind. For all his enthusiasm for adventure sports, I doubted Markowitz had ever killed a large animal except by hitting one with his car. Hopefully he wouldn’t make too big a mess of it.

As I turned back toward the north, I tapped on my ear bud to shift frequencies and check in with Sharon.

To my relief, not much had changed on her end. After passing through the Damascus Gate, her litter had made its way south along the city wall.

She sounded subdued, though, and after she told me the story, it wasn’t hard to understand why.

Their procession had stopped two more times to rest the porters. Each time, guards had kept the swarm of mendicants following them at bay. On the last stop, though, one beggar, seeing a soldier’s attention diverted, had rushed up to the litter and thrust a cup through the curtain.

Though this man wasn’t a leper, Azariah called out to another guard, and Sharon could only watch helplessly as the soldier cudgeled the poor fellow with a strong blow to the back of the head, leaving his skull cracked open and his motionless body bleeding in the dust.

“He walked on as if he had stepped on a bug,” she said.

From his perspective, he probably had.

She explained, too, just what a close call our Temple excursion had been.

Roughly thirty years later, on what could have been the same exact spot, excitable self-appointed busybodies — the curse of every religion — had accused the apostle Paul of bringing “Greeks” into the Temple and defiling it. He barely escaped the subsequent riot in one piece and never took another step as a free man — eventually going to his death in Rome, in chains.

No wonder the archaeologist had turned so pale.

Otherwise, Sharon seemed OK, so I tapped my ear to switch back to Lavon’s frequency. Although he didn’t respond to my inquiries, I could hear him speaking calmly and concluded that Markowitz must have made it into the Temple without further incident.

Bryson, though, was a different matter. As I threaded my way back though the trash and thorn bushes of the Kidron Ravine, I listened to him speak of his latest brainstorm.

“Would he know Joseph of Arimathea?” he asked.

“What?”

“Nicodemus: would he know Joseph?”

“Certainly,” said Lavon.

“Then that may be our answer. Culloden’s right. I’m not sure I’ll be able to find the exact site of the tomb the way I had planned. Triangulating with sufficient accuracy will be harder than I thought.”

Lavon didn’t reply. By now he could guess what was coming next.

“If you go back there and ask him, perhaps he can introduce us to Joseph.”

This was lunacy.

Obviously, Lavon thought so, too.

“Let me ask you something. Say some stranger walked into your MIT lab and asked where your family’s cemetery plot was. What would you do?”

“I’d ask why they wanted to know.”

“Yes, just before you called campus security to come with a straitjacket. What answer could we possibly give? In a few years, you’ll have the most famous tomb on the planet? ”

Bryson didn’t say anything for a moment.

“I suppose you’re right,” he finally replied. “Still, we should find some way to inquire of these people while we have the chance. Maybe we could report a workman got injured or something.”

I couldn’t listen to any more of this nonsense. Besides my ear was starting to itch, so I popped the device out as I climbed up the steep incline toward the Reptile Garden. Though I had learned the facility’s true purpose, I couldn’t help calling it that.

Once there, I located my benefactor and dropped the handful of the coins Lavon had given me onto a table. I’m good for my debts as a matter of principle, and given the way things had transpired so far, I didn’t think it would hurt to have a few more friends, just in case.

The priest gestured as if he wanted me to stay, but I showed him Lavon’s missive and motioned that I needed to be moving on.

I had only a short jog to the Antonia. Lavon’s note worked as expected, and a few minutes later, I found myself escorted into the presence of Publius, who was conducting a final equipment inspection before he sent two squads out on patrol.

He eyeballed my bedraggled appearance with a look of surprise. Since my earpiece wasn’t in, I couldn’t understand a word he was saying, though the gist wasn’t too hard to figure out.

“ Lestes ,” I replied. It was the only Greek word I knew.

I suppose a story that I had been attacked by bandits was plausible enough. Fortunately he didn’t press the issue, since the last thing I wanted to mention was Markowitz’s venture into the Temple.

Instead, he directed my attention to a cluster of soldiers standing around a small canopy about twenty yards away.

I strode over to the group without looking back, dodging a pile of armor as I went. One of the soldiers glanced at Publius and then instructed the others to move out of my way. As they did so, it wasn’t hard to see why.

I wasn’t the only one having a really bad day.

Medics attended to two seriously wounded Romans lying on stretchers in the shade. I could see immediately that the man on the left wouldn’t last long. Blunt force trauma, from a club, probably, had caved in the side of his skull just behind his left eye. I was no expert, but even in a modern hospital, I would have rated his odds of survival no better than one in five.

I turned to Publius and shook my head before addressing the second case.

This man also faced grave peril. As the medics removed his blood-soaked tunic, I spotted a deep gash in his abdomen, and a closer inspection confirmed the worst: a small tear in the peritoneal sac surrounding his intestines.

I called for water as I considered what to do. The primary danger with this type of injury is infection, usually resulting from fragments of dirty clothing or intestinal material itself seeping into the abdominal cavity.

Army field protocol for such wounds calls for a soldier to press sterile gauze into the opening and then wrap the wound snugly, followed by a quick evacuation of the patient to a field hospital where physicians can clean out any foreign matter and administer the required antibiotics.

Today, though, I was on my own. I could only try and hope for the best.

As a servant placed a large bowl of water on the ground beside me, I reached into my bag and removed a small package of powdered iodine, which I dumped into the bowl and stirred until the solution was an even light brown.

The other soldiers watched curiously as I washed my hands in the iodine and then made a closer inspection of the wound. I used tweezers to pull several small fragments of the man’s tunic away from the opening before thoroughly cleaning the surrounding area with a patch of iodine soaked gauze.

Afterward, I clamped the opening with a couple of butterfly bandages and covered the area with an antibiotic laced compress. It was all I could do. He might not live, but he’d at least have a fighting chance.

To the extent that I could pantomime, I instructed the others to give the man only boiled water to drink and nothing to eat for at least a day, though I wasn’t sure how well I got my instructions across.

***

I had to wait for the soldiers’ attention to be diverted before I could slip my ear bud in once more. I tried first to reach Lavon, but for some reason, he didn’t respond.