The Third Day Read online

  I stuck my earpiece in.

  “Sharon,” I called out. “Sharon, can you hear me?”

  Nothing.

  “Sharon, come in.”

  I heard a whooshing sound, then an unintelligible voice.

  “Sharon?”

  “Bill?”

  I sighed with relief. “Sharon, can you hear me?”

  “Yes, where are you?” Her reply was louder this time; her tone anxious.

  “I’m still trying to figure that out. All I know for sure is that I’m northeast of town, outside the city walls. I got walloped on the head and just came to a minute ago. Where are you?”

  “I don’t know. I’m in a litter. They’re taking me somewhere.”

  “A litter?”

  “Yes, just like those old movies. It’s like a queen sized bed mounted on poles. Four guys on each side are carrying it. There’s the curtain; the whole works.”

  Litters had always puzzled me – surely the most impractical mode of transportation ever devised, suitable only for a culture with vast pools of expendable labor and little desire to go anywhere in a hurry.

  Still, this was encouraging. Someone intent on hurting her wouldn’t be transporting her in that manner.

  “I heard another voice. Is anyone with you?”

  A pause.

  “They can’t understand you,” I said. “Just look up at the sky like you’re praying or something. At worst, they’ll think you’re half crazy.”

  Another pause.

  “There’s only one man. He’s dressed pretty nicely, compared to the others we’ve seen. The material looks like silk. Do you know if they had silk in the first century?”

  I wasn’t sure. I only learned later, from Lavon, that the Roman upper classes had such a voracious appetite for the stuff that a succession of emperors had attempted to ban the trade in order to keep the empire’s gold reserves from flowing to China.

  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.

  Chapter 29

  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 wor
ds 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.

  I now felt like a human being again for the first time since coming to. I pointed to the crowds thronging into the other building with a questioning look. He answered, but either he didn’t speak Greek or the translation software wasn’t working quite right, so I only caught a few random words.

  Then I experienced something even more bizarre. Another assistant, bald and dressed exactly like his counterparts, emerged from a back closet grasping a handful of docile brown snakes. He lifted them up to his boss, who appeared to bless them.

  As soon as the old man had finished, the kid bowed and headed toward the main building.

  This I had to see.

  I gestured my request and the priest nodded his approval, signaling me to follow. Surprisingly, given what I had observed earlier, the mob let us pass through with only a minimum of pushing and shoving.

  But as soon as I got inside, I wished they hadn’t.

  An indescribable stench assaulted my senses. Surrounding an irregularly shaped pool at the courtyard’s center was a veritable sea of human misery. Hundreds of men – they were almost all men – with twisted and broken limbs lay packed, sardine-like, on woven pallets.

  Others, who had been shunted off to one side, bore a ghastly array of tumors, pustules, and open wounds. Most of them simply stared up at the sky, alone in their thoughts, while friends or relatives attended to a fortunate few.

  My companion, though, paid none of this any heed. Instead, he deposited his serpentine burden at various places near the pool and then scooted out the opposite door, with no more emotion than a package delivery service.

  The reptiles slithered out of sight almost immediately, though to my surprise, none of the assembled wretches showed any consternation at their presence.

  This seemed to be normal, or whatever passed for normal in this strange place.

  And that wasn’t the half of it. A short time thereafter, the air began to buzz in a cacophony of languages as the more vigorous of the sick and injured jostled for position at the edge of the water, pushing and shoving in search of a favorable spot.

  I could sense the energy of the crowd. They were waiting for something with eager anticipation, though I didn’t know what.

  I gestured to a priest, but he just kept his eyes on the water and shrugged.

  A few minutes later, I felt a low rumble, and the crowd suddenly stilled, with every eye riveted on the pool.

  Seconds afterward, a bubble broke the surface.

  As if a starter’s gun had fired, the entire mass of humanity surged forward as best they could in a pell-mell scramble, leaving dozens of the front ranks to flail about wildly in the churning water.

  This went on for some time, until the thrashing finally started to slow. At that point, a priest gave a signal, and a group of younger men – apprentices, maybe – began to shove the crowds back with wooden batons.

  Once they had cleared sufficient space to work, a second crew began to fish the soggy unfortunates out of the pool and carry them back toward the walls as the poor creatures squawked in futile protest.

  As the laborers were about to leave, though, one of their number pointed down into the water and signaled to an older priest. He sauntered down with a long wooden hook that reminded me of the ones used by theater impresarios in Saturday morning cartoons to yank dreadful performers off the stage.

  Only this time, I didn’t laugh. After two tries, the man snagged his quarry and pulled the drowned body to the surface.

  Except for that priest, not another soul in the building cared.

  Chapter 30

  I pushed my way toward the south entrance, dodging the dispirited packs of invalids as best I could until I finally made it outside. From there, I kept going for another fifty yards as I strained to recall the details of the map Lavon had shown us before we departed Bryson’s lab.

  I stopped for a moment to get my bearings, savoring the fresh air. To my east, a narrow path ran between a disheveled pile of construction materials at the edge of a steep cliff. According to Lavon, this was most likely the initial segment of what would become a third wall surrounding Jerusalem’s growing northern suburbs.

  I didn’t see any laborers, though, and this also fit with what the archaeologist had told us earlier: the Third Wall had been a haphazard enterprise for decades until the Revolt finally lent urgency to its completion.

  Not that the effort did the Jews much good. When push came to shove, Roman siege engineers broke through it in a matter of days.

  But that was forty years into the future. If I wanted to last forty more hours, I needed to find the others.

  Looking down, I could see a narrow trail snaking its way down into the valley below before turning back up to the other side. There, a long ridge ran parallel to the city’s eastern walls: the Mount of Olives.

  I didn’t see any other man-made path, so I surmised that travelers wanting to go south from where I was would cross over to the Mount and then follow a parallel track along the back side.

  If that was where the others had gone, I still had a chance.

  I trekked along the path until I reached the base of the Kidron Ravine, where I turned right and headed down my improvised shortcut at a steady jog. Fortunately, the vegetation had not grown too thick, so I made good progress.

  The place smelled – I recalled Lavon’s comment about the ravine being the city’s garbage dump – but after what I had experienced already, I couldn’t complain.

  I could also see, as I looked up at the city’s imposing eastern walls, why no invader had ever attacked Jerusalem from this direction. From where I stood, the top of the fortifications must have risen over two hundred feet, straight up.

  The scrub trees got thicker, and thornier, as I reached the halfway point. The cheap sandals that my friendly snake-charmers had lent me protected my feet, but it didn’t take long for my arms and calves to look like I had wrestled in barbed wire.

  I pressed on, though, and after a few more minutes, I spotted a large crowd of people and animals gathering at Jerusalem’s southern gate.

  To my relief, I also saw that the main road swung far to the south of the Mount of Olives before turning back north toward the city. As long as the others had traveled
at a normal pace, the odds were good that I had managed to reach the gate ahead of them.

  I slowed my pace to a fast walk and decided to check in with Sharon.

  I inserted my earpiece, but didn’t even have a chance to call out.

  “Oh my God,” she said.

  I heard some shouting in the background, too, but it didn’t translate.

  “Sharon, what is it? Are you OK?”

  She didn’t reply for a moment. When she did, I could tell she had seen something horrific.

  She struggled to find the right words. “We just stopped again; this man is holding up a cup; he wants me to give him something.”

  “What kind of man?” I asked.

  “I … I, uh, I’m not sure.”

  She finally collected herself enough to give me a rough description.

  Hardened spherical nodules, several larger than a quarter, covered his face and neck. Live insects crawled through the remnants of a gray, scraggly beard. Compounding the dreadfulness of his appearance, a strip of cloth fell away as the man edged closer, revealing a huge open red sore.

  Except for the insects, I had seen this once, years ago, in central Africa.

  I had hoped never to see it again.

  “Look at his hands,” I said.

  She did so, and gasped.

  As I suspected, the fingers had degenerated into stumps, the flesh eaten away.

  “It’s leprosy, Sharon; an advanced case. Try not to touch him.”

  I needn’t have worried. Sharon’s captor didn’t want him around either. He called out to one of the litter bearers, who stepped up and kicked the man square in the chest. The rest of their crew laughed as the beggar scrambled away, crawling on all fours.

  She didn’t say anything else for a moment. Leprosy was not an ailment that twenty-first century Americans thought much about. Like togas and spears, the disease belonged to a long-vanished age.

  If only.

  “A boyfriend in college once told me that the armadillo could be a carrier and that I should avoid handling them for that reason. I didn’t believe him, though. He was always telling these ridiculous stories.”