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  Lavon started laughing.

  “Well, what did he say?” asked Markowitz.

  “He said we had strange names.”

  “That’s it?”

  “No; the best part is that he insists that we accompany them to Jerusalem.”

  “Why is that so funny?” asked Bryson.

  Lavon chuckled again. “He said it’s not safe for us to stay here.”

  Chapter 17

  After the morning’s misadventures, I needed no convincing to move on. An army escort to the city would at least raise the odds that we would arrive in Jerusalem in one piece, though unless Bryson’s wife got that machine working again, I couldn’t say I had the greatest confidence that we would depart in the same condition.

  A Roman medic helped Sharon into the wagon where she took her place on a side rail next to three of the wounded who were unable to make the journey under their own power.

  Being men, it was assumed that rest of us would tag along on foot, despite the fact that Bryson only managed to squeeze in minimal cardio work while Bergfeld had run two triathlons in the past year.

  To his credit, the Professor didn’t complain, and Sharon was prescient enough to take her luck where she could find it.

  Publius by now had trotted up to the front of the column, leaving his second in command, who introduced himself as Decius, to supervise the rear. An optio, Lavon called him, just below a centurion in rank.

  Decius struck me as a pleasant enough fellow – one who would remain so as long as we stayed out of his way and didn’t cause any trouble. He had the gruff but competent demeanor of a seasoned NCO, the soldiers who are the backbone of any army worthy of the name.

  We stood aside as the optio made a few final checks and then signaled to Publius that the column was ready to proceed. Moments later, a trumpet sounded and we started forward.

  As I expected, we had barely gone a quarter mile when the questions started. Lavon was quick-witted enough to mumble something to the soldiers about his Greek not being good enough for medical terminology, but this excuse wouldn’t work for our own party.

  I explained that I had utilized the Army’s latest high tech bandage. A powder on one side became part of the clotting matrix, while an antibiotic-impregnated glue on the other held the sides of the wound together as securely as if they had been sutured.

  It was, truly, a miracle of modern chemistry. US field hospitals are first-rate, but wounded soldiers still had to live long enough to get there. Bleeding out was one of the main reasons they didn’t.

  “How do you remove it once the wound has healed?” asked Bryson.

  “You don’t,” I replied. “That’s the best part. In a couple of weeks, the body’s own enzymes begin to dissolve the material. A few days later, it disappears entirely.”

  Lavon glanced over to the injured Roman. “What are his chances, realistically?”

  Fortunately for us, they were pretty good. Profuse bleeding often carries out the dirt, so the odds were at least reasonable that his wound would not get infected.

  “He’s lost a lot of fluid, though,” I said. “I’d put in an IV drip, if I had one. A tetanus shot wouldn’t be a bad idea either.”

  They all laughed, except Bryson, who had swung around to Juliet’s thinking on the issue and chided me for possibly changing history.

  “I brought no weapons, Professor, but I sure as hell wasn’t coming back to a primitive world without a decent first aid kit.”

  “That man would have died. Now he will live.”

  For all his academic brilliance, Dr. Bryson didn’t have the best sense of priorities. “At the moment, I’m more concerned about us living,” I replied.

  He frowned.

  “Tell me how they could reverse engineer this sort of thing?” I said. “The wrapping is biodegradable, too. In a week or so, it will vanish completely. It’s especially designed to decay in this type of climate.”

  “I didn’t realize the Army had gone green.”

  “I’m not pretending we have, Professor, but our enemies over the last fifty years have proven resourceful at using our throwaways against us. You undoubtedly know that the Viet Cong made booby traps out of old ration tins and shell casings. The Afghans did the same thing to the Russians, and are doing it again to us, from what I hear. The less we leave behind, the better.”

  It was then that I thought of the camera.

  “Speaking of left behind, Professor, do you have your video camera?”

  He didn’t, of course, so Lavon asked Decius if we could go back and retrieve it, explaining that the good Doctor had dropped his money bag in his haste to flee the Zealots.

  Decius agreed, and we went trotting back down the hill. We started at the cave’s mouth and headed west, intending to retrace his steps. As I suspected, Bryson couldn’t track his own backside, so it fell to me to find his trail, which I did after a short search.

  As in all dry climates, the morning had warmed quickly. Though I was more comfortable, this left one downside: the air reeked of hacked off limbs, rotting intestines, and other detritus of the earlier battle.

  I glanced over to Bryson and grinned. I’m not exactly fond of such things, but I got a bit of undeserved enjoyment from his queasiness. So far, his return chips had failed; and our lives hung in the balance.

  “I assume your wife can operate the control room by herself, without that young fool’s assistance?” I said.

  “His name was Scott,” replied Bryson. “He was my most promising student.”

  “What do you think he did?” I asked. “Sneak in on his own, or did he blackmail her by threatening to go to the media, or to the police to report your disappearance?”

  “Blackmail?” he replied. “Is that all your twisted mind can think of?”

  “It’s why we’re here, Professor.”

  Bryson turned and stared. “What?”

  “Like we told you earlier, Juliet wanted to send only Dr. Lavon. He was the logical choice, since he’s studied this region for years and is the only one among us able to communicate properly with the locals. This, by the way, was Lavon’s choice, too. He wasn’t very excited to have company.”

  “So why are the rest of you here?”

  “Ray decided he wanted to go, too. Once he accepted the idea that you had actually managed to pull this off, no one could stop him.”

  “Surely Juliet tried?”

  “She did, but Ray brought up the contract you had with his father. If he couldn’t go, he threatened to shut your whole operation down, which, of course, would have left you – ”

  “Lying in that cave.”

  “Yes.”

  “What about the woman? Why is she here?”

  “Lavon leads a university archaeological team. Conducting a dig according to the most rigorous scientific principles can be an expensive proposition. Sharon’s family has provided the majority of their funding for the past three years.”

  “So she threatened to close his project down, too.”

  “Something like that.”

  “That doesn’t explain why you’re here. What is it you want?”

  “Well, if we’re discussing blackmail, I wanted to speak with you about how to split up that billion dollars you made.”

  Bryson jaw dropped and he stared at me with wild eyes.

  I laughed. “Just kidding, Professor.” Sort of.

  He wasn’t quite sure how to respond, so he just followed along as I traced his path. It wasn’t pretty. His trail crossed the tracks of the fleeing Zealots. Dried blood covered part of a footprint, and carrion-eaters had not yet carried off the chunks of human entrails lying next to a rock a few feet away.

  I pointed to the remains and grew serious. “You asked me what I wanted, Professor? Actually, I’d like nothing more than to get the five of us together, press this button, and go back to Boston while we still can.”

  But he never responded. Just then, his trail became so obvious that even he could trace it. He charged forward.<
br />
  “Here it is,” he shouted, holding the video camera high in triumph.

  “You, um, might not want anyone else to see that,” I said.

  He dropped his arm quickly, with a sheepish grin on his face. “Of course.”

  ***

  In a less dangerous moment, I would have found Bryson’s transformation fascinating. Less than an hour earlier, he had wailed over his dead lab assistant like a long lost son. Now that he had his camera, he didn’t give the kid another thought, so single-minded he had become.

  I asked him about it, and he explained that we could return and retrieve Scott the same way we had come back for him.

  Assuming we survived, I thought, but I decided not to argue.

  We went back to the cave to recover the kid’s chip – having no value to the soldiers, they had left it dangling on the string around his neck – but otherwise, prudence dictated that we not linger. The Roman column had disappeared around a bend, and nearby, I spotted a hacked-off forearm lying beside a small scrub bush. Something, vultures probably, had already taken a nibble.

  “I suggest we get back. These people might have friends, and I don’t think we want to be around if they show up.”

  ***

  I asked Bryson to hand me the camera in exchange for my money bag, just in case Decius asked the Professor to demonstrate what he had found, but my concerns were unfounded. The Roman said nothing to us when we returned. Instead, he and the wounded men in the wagon appeared to be telling each other jokes.

  My first platoon sergeant had done the same thing, and for the same reason, I guessed: to lift their spirits and thus enhance their odds of survival.

  The rest of our party was in surprisingly good humor as well, despite the fact that by modern Western standards, they had seen more than a lifetime’s worth of violent death. Once we pulled away from the scene itself, Bryson, Lavon and Sharon began to relate to each other their impressions of what they had witnessed.

  Only Markowitz stayed out of the conversation. He just stared back in silence at the birds circling over the battle site.

  After a little while, I grew concerned. “You OK there, buddy?” I asked.

  He didn’t reply.

  Without acknowledging me at all, he stepped over to Lavon and tugged on his shoulder. “Robert, can you ask this centurion what will happen to those bodies?”

  Lavon did so, but the Roman officer just looked at him blankly and shrugged, as if unable to comprehend why anyone would care.

  Quite frankly, I wondered the same thing.

  Decius turned and said something to the men in the wagon. It must have been another joke, for the injured soldiers began laughing uproariously.

  Lavon told me later what they had said.

  “The dogs and vultures must eat, too,” replied one of the legionnaires. “Would the gods approve of us depriving them of their sustenance?”

  As the soldiers burst out in laughter again, Lavon chuckled along with them. As for me, I put the issue out of my mind.

  I shouldn’t have.

  Chapter 18

  We marched for close to an hour before Publius brought our column to a halt just outside a small village. As soon as we stopped, the Romans launched into a well-drilled routine. Two lookouts scrambled up the nearest hill, about twenty yards away, where they stood with their backs to each other, each scanning a semicircle for potential threats.

  Two unlucky squads – the Roman term was contuburnia, Lavon explained – remained on guard while the others dropped their heavy burdens and quickly found shade underneath nearby olive trees, though an additional group of soldiers did not begin their break until they had erected an improvised cover to shield the wounded men in the wagon from the sun.

  As the soldiers rested, four servants who had accompanied them carried jugs of water and ladled refreshment out to each man before scurrying back to the center of the village to fill their containers from a crudely dug well.

  Like the soldiers, Bryson and Markowitz headed for some large rocks underneath a shade tree. By contrast, Lavon and Bergfeld ran straight up a small hill to the edge of a three-foot stone wall that enclosed a flat, hard-packed surface about twenty-five feet in diameter. I decided to join them.

  Sharon trained her sight on what looked like a sled leaning against the opposite side. Pieces of it were flaking away at the edges, and compounding its bedraggled appearance, dozens of rock fragments were embedded into the wood on one side. To me, it belonged either in a landfill or as décor in a cheap, all-you-can-eat steak house.

  “Wow, check that out!” she said.

  Lavon seemed equally excited. I followed them around the wall’s perimeter but finally had to ask.

  “What’s so interesting about that piece of junk?”

  The subject of their enthusiasm turned out to be a threshing floor, and what I took for a sled was actually the threshing machine. Local farmers would pile their sheaves of grain on the hard surface and hook up the sled behind a donkey or an ox, fragment side down.

  Then, they’d pile stones on top of the sled for extra weight, and the animal would drag the thing back and forth, shredding the sheaves and separating the grain from the straw. The whole process sounded terribly inefficient.

  “I thought they just threw it up in the air and let the wind blow away the chaff,” I said.

  “That was the next step,” Bergfeld replied.

  I was right about the inefficiency, though. Lavon explained that anyone who could afford to mounted iron blades on the underside of the sled. This thing was better than nothing, but just barely.

  “These people are really poor,” he said.

  I glanced around at the surrounding structures and could not argue. Only in the loosest definition of the term could they be called buildings. The best of them consisted of rough, unfinished stone, held together by an altogether inadequate amount of mortar. Most didn’t even have roofs. Instead, they were covered by a thick black fabric.

  “It’s goat hair,” said Lavon. “It works better than you’d think. The hair expands as it gets wet, so it does a reasonably good job of keeping out the rain; and when it dries, the small open spaces allow for some air circulation.”

  I mumbled something about preferring shingles, but they paid me no mind and went charging ahead. I followed along and stood behind them as they poked their noses into the next house. Inside this one, a crude, unfinished table rested in the center, while two equally rudimentary benches sat to either side. One had toppled backwards.

  The occupants had mounted a rough-hewn wooden shelf on the back wall, but it held nothing; and the only other object in sight was a broken pot on the floor.

  “Someone left in a hurry,” I said.

  “I think they all did,” said Lavon. “They probably heard the soldiers coming and decided not to stick around. I’m sure word of the skirmish this morning has already gone ahead.”

  That jolted me into glancing back toward the road. Given the side we had chosen – or rather had chosen for us – I didn’t want to be too far from the Romans if any of the village’s residents decided to come back early.

  My companions, though, had other things on their minds. By the time I caught up to them at the top of the next hill, they were chattering excitedly; this time over a house on the other side – built atop what looked like a cave.

  “It’s nice to know modern archaeology got something right,” said Lavon. “This is exactly what I’ve always pictured a first century Judean house looking like.”

  “The family stays upstairs,” said Bergfeld. “When the weather is nice, as it often is around here, they’ll sleep under the stars on the flat roof.”

  “Who lives on the lower level? Livestock?”

  “Yes,” said Lavon, “along with household servants, if they have any. It’s quite a clever setup. They take full advantage of the terrain in an environment where construction lumber is prohibitively expensive.”

  I glanced back around. “Clever” wasn’t th
e first word that occurred to me.

  Taken as a whole, the ramshackle village reminded me of a more primitive version of a third world shantytown, though I suppose as in those places, these people did the best with what they had, which wasn’t much.

  “Jesus would have been born in something like this,” said Lavon.

  “This?” I asked.

  “Not this particular town, of course, but it was this kind of house, we think. The upstairs part was full, so Mary and Joseph had to go to the lower level. It wasn’t quite as bad as the modern English version of the Christmas story makes it out to be. The mean old innkeeper wasn’t exiling them to the barn.”

  “Childbirth without anesthetics – that would have been the bad part,” said Bergfeld.

  I had never thought of it that way, nor had most men I was sure.

  “How many people would you estimate live here?” I asked.

  Lavon studied the village for a moment. “I’d guess about a hundred, more or less,” he said. “Bethlehem was probably about the same size,” he added.

  “It’s an area the church’s critics get wrong,” said Bergfeld. “Some of them say that Herod’s slaughter of the infants never took place, since no source outside the Bible mentions it.”

  “What they don’t understand,” said Lavon, “is that in the scheme of things in the ancient world, such an event – though tragic to the families involved – would have barely registered a blip.”

  This day was turning out to be full of surprises, and we had barely begun. I had always pictured Bethlehem as a small but thriving town. Growing up, the priests had made Herod’s actions sound like the massacre of a large American grade school. I told them so.

  This was not unusual.

  “I grew up with the same impression,” said Lavon. “But a town of this size wouldn’t have held more than a handful of boys of the requisite age. Plus, they were peasants. No one else really cared.”