David Epperson - The Third Day

“How much gold?” she asked.

Lavon looked around the room and finally pointed to the water jug, which looked like it held a couple of gallons.

“Do you see that jug?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Fill it with gold; it will all be yours.”

Her eyes lit up for a moment, but then I could see her grow skeptical. Whatever that amounted to in modern US dollars — roughly $5 million, I learned later — I knew Sharon’s old man had it. But once again, Lavon seemed to be overselling our case.

Naomi sat quietly on the bed, considering her options.

“I can’t believe she doesn’t jump at the chance,” said Bryson.

From the modern perspective, the Professor might have been right, but as I thought about it, her hesitation was understandable.

Despite her duties, Naomi lived in the palace, while most women of Jerusalem spent their days emptying chamber pots, or standing in line for water and carrying it half a mile, several times a day.

“You may find it hard to comprehend, but by their standards, she has something to lose,” I said.

That gave Lavon an idea.

“Naomi, how long have you lived in the palace?”

She considered this for a moment. “Fourteen years. Azariah bought me when I was eleven.”

“So you are twenty-five years old?”

“Yes.”

“What will you do when you get older?” he asked.

She paused to think. “I will oversee the palace women, when I am too old to serve men directly.”

“How can you be sure of this?”

“The king and his officers all favor me.”

“Yes; for now,” said Lavon, “but the king can change his mind, can’t he? Besides, kings die; and kings are overthrown, all over the world, all the time. If Herod were no longer king, you could just as easily spend the rest of your days scrubbing latrines.”

She frowned. I was certain that this had crossed her mind before; but as with other unpleasant truths, she had pushed it to the back of her consciousness. It was something I did often enough.

“Help us,” said Lavon. “We can spare you that fate.”

She sat there for maybe five minutes, weighing her decision, with her mind going back and forth.

I began to grow concerned: we had only a limited time window, and without someone who knew the ins and outs of the palace, our mission was almost certainly doomed.

As it turned out, it wasn’t the prospect of buckets of gold or flights through the heavens that saved us; nor was it her dread of an old age spent in degrading servitude.

It was a tooth.

She suddenly gave a sharp cry and reached up to her jaw with her hand.

Now I’m even less of a real dentist than I am a doctor — I don’t even play one of those on TV — but I made a great show of examining her, even if all I had to offer was a small tube of oral analgesic.

Luckily, it worked.

Lavon explained to her that if she came back with us, we could fix her teeth permanently and she would experience no more pain. As strange as it may sound, that did the trick.

After the servant had brought our breakfast, I asked Lavon to have him run back down and fetch a pen and paper, intending to use Naomi’s assistance to scribble out a basic diagram of the palace, so that we could have at least a semblance of a plan before we set off.

The archaeologist just laughed.

What we called paper in the modern world didn’t exist, and papyrus was far too expensive to hand out on a casual basis. Complicating matters still further, ancient scribes made their inks on the spot, just before use.

“The inks are organic,” he explained. “They’ll spoil if they are not used quickly.”

I sighed and began rummaging through my kit for a substitute, though I hadn’t made much progress when Lavon called out.

“I hear something,” he said.

I reinserted my ear bud and heard a male voice, but the translation was only gibberish. The speaker, whoever he was, wasn’t conversing in Greek.

It was only then that I recalled who the speaker probably was.

I gestured toward Naomi. “Knowing what they are talking about could make or break our enterprise,” I said.

The archaeologist cast me a dubious glance, but after considering our limited options, he shrugged, as if to say “why not?”

“Let’s just hope she doesn’t scream,” he said.

Lavon walked over to the bed and sat down beside her. He removed his ear bud so that she could see it. Then, he went through a charade of putting it in his own ear and taking it out again, several times.

Afterward, he held it up to the side of Naomi’s head. A few seconds later, the same voice I had heard earlier came through loud and clear.

She leapt from the bed.

“It is Azariah!” she gasped.

Lavon just smiled. “We know.”

I popped my earpiece out and smiled also as I showed it to her. Lavon and I both chuckled softly as she gaped at us, wide-eyed, in open astonishment.

She stood as if frozen in place for a few more seconds; then, suddenly, she dropped to her knees and pressed her face to the ground.

“Who wants to be Zeus?” I said.

Lavon didn’t reply. Instead, he reached down, gently grasped her hands and lifted her to her feet.

“We are men,” he said, “not gods. Do not be afraid.”

Naomi cast nervously about the room; her face a ghostly pale. When she appeared to have recovered a small fraction of her composure, he guided her back to the bed and once more sat down at her side.

She turned toward me. I tapped my ear and spoke.

“Tell her it’s OK,” I said to Lavon.

He did so, and then had an even better idea. He instructed me to disable the translation feature and to hold my device up to her ear. He walked over to the opposite side of the room, turned his back, and whispered in Greek.

She couldn’t hear his normal voice from that distance, but she understood his words perfectly. Whatever he said had a soothing effect.

Lavon came back, cupped her face gently between his hands, and lifted it up until their eyes met. Then he repeated what he had whispered into the transmitter.

“Did I not tell you that if you helped us, you would see wonders beyond your wildest imagination?” he said.

“Tell her if she doesn’t help us, she’ll be consumed in a giant fireball,” said Bryson.

I wasn’t sure whether the Professor was joking, and to his credit, Lavon knew a stupid idea when he heard it.

I glared at Bryson to remain silent, and after a little more time had elapsed, Naomi’s breathing dropped back close to its normal rate. Whatever this strange object was, she appeared to have concluded that it was unlikely to cause her immediate demise.

Lavon spoke again, even more softly this time, and asked her to translate the Aramaic into Greek. He helped seat the device properly in her ear, then instructed me to listen in as an additional safeguard.

Naomi listened with her eyes closed. At the first lull in the conversation, she turned to Lavon and explained.

“It is Azariah,” she repeated. “I would recognize his voice anywhere.”

“Can you tell where he is?” asked Lavon.

She listened for a few more seconds. “He is with the king.”

So Herod had kept his “gift” after all.

Naomi rattled off other names that were unimportant, all something- iah, who had gathered together with a flock of her fellow palace courtesans. From the way she described it, the denizens of Herod’s playpen were only now waking up.

“Do you know where they are?” I asked. “Where is the king right now?”

She considered this for a moment. “The king’s personal bed chamber is on the third floor, at the southern end of the palace complex. When he is in Jerusalem, he is always there at this time of day.”