The Gods Help Those Page 21
“That’s how long treasures had been piling up in the temple.” A trace of pride crept into Josephus’ voice. “I doubt that anybody knows—or could know—how much had accumulated. And then Herod rebuilt it, in the days of Augustus whom you call deified, and made it even more magnificent, and more treasure poured in. I could hardly contain my grief that day as I watched it all pass before those laughing and jeering crowds.” His voice broke and he looked down.
“Remember,” Naomi said, “you only watched the parade. My son and I walked in it, in chains. We were forced to carry silver bowls, heavy silver bowls.” My mother put an arm around Naomi’s shoulder as servant and friend began to cry.
Josephus looked at Phineas in awe. “I believe I do remember seeing a boy with red hair carrying something that day.”
“You should have been walking beside us,” Phineas said angrily. He moved toward Josephus. I stepped between them and pushed Phineas back.
“I shouldn’t have come here,” Naomi said. “It’s too painful.” She pulled away from my mother and began to run along the Via Sacra, back toward my house.
“Go after your mother,” I told Phineas. “See that she gets home safely.”
Phineas glared at me, then at Josephus. For a moment I wasn’t sure whether he was going to obey me. Then he spat out, “Yes, my lord.” Naomi was already out of sight as Phineas pushed his way through the crowd to catch up with her.
“She needs me,” my mother said, turning to go after Naomi.
“You can’t go alone.” I made a grab for her arm but failed to catch her.
Mother shook her head. “I’m just a pathetic old woman. No one is going to bother me.”
Watching her disappear into the crowd, I turned to Aurora. “I don’t like this. My people are getting strung out, in single file.”
“I’ll go,” Aurora said. Before I could pick out a few men to go with her, she was gone. I chose two men and told them to gather up my mother, Naomi, Phineas, and Aurora and escort them home.
“I’m sorry this has been so difficult for you,” Josephus said. “Perhaps another time…”
I shook my head. “I think everything’s under control. I just want to ask you about one more thing.”
“And what would that be?”
“A box. I don’t see a box depicted on the arch.”
“Why should there be?” Josephus asked.
“Lucullus claimed to know something about a special box—some kind of treasure, I think—that was buried under the temple. He was going to tell Regulus what he knew, once he had his consulship.”
Josephus shook his head. “Then he knew something that no Jew knows.”
“You don’t know where this box is buried?”
“It’s called the Ark of the Covenant and, no, we don’t know where it is.”
Or won’t admit to knowing, I thought.
“It was last seen before the Babylonians destroyed our first temple. That was almost a hundred years before your Republic was founded. There is no mention of it among the loot that Nebuchadnezzar took to Babylon. It may have been hidden at that time or carried off, but no one knows where it is now.”
“What’s so special about it?” Tacitus asked.
“It is the place where God meets his people. It sat in the Holy of Holies in the temple. The high priest entered there only on one day of the year. No one else was ever allowed in there.”
“Does it have any magical powers?” I asked. “Lucullus seemed to think it does.”
“Our sacred texts say that it granted us victory when we carried it into battle. On the other hand, anyone who touched it would be killed.”
“How could you carry something without touching it?” Tacitus asked.
“Special gold-plated poles ran through rings on the sides.”
“So your god would be carried around like someone riding in a litter?”
“I wouldn’t put it exactly like that, but that’s not entirely inaccurate. It wasn’t God himself, though—he has no physical existence—but the sense of his presence, his glory.”
Sounds like Epicurus’ less densely packed atoms, I thought, something that might just float away.
“What did this box look like?” I asked. “Are you allowed to describe it to non-Jews?”
“Its appearance is no secret. It’s described in our texts as being two and a half cubits long, one and a half cubits high and the same width. On the top of it were two angelic figures facing one another with their wings covering the lid. It was coated in gold, inside and out. Phineas can show you the passage when you get home.”
“Was there anything in this Ark?” Tacitus asked. “Gold? Treasure?”
“Nothing like that,” Josephus said. “It contained two stone tablets on which were inscribed the ten basic rules of our faith, which God gave to Moses on Mount Sinai. There was also a rod which had sprouted buds, and a jar holding samples of the special bread with which we were fed during our wandering in the desert.”
“So Lucullus had no idea what he was talking about?”
Josephus stroked his beard. “Over the centuries legends have grown up about the Ark, mostly among people who don’t understand what it is. It would be a treasure beyond any price for Jews if we could find it, but I suspect it would bring disaster down on anyone who tried to use it for their own purposes.”
Maybe I should hope that Regulus finds it then. Perhaps Titus had found it. That could explain why his short time in power had been filled with disasters—the eruption of Vesuvius, a plague and a fire in Rome. Of course, the destruction of a god’s temple might be enough to bring down his wrath, without touching his magic box.
XIII
Blast! Which way did they go?” I muttered, as I came to the place where the Via Sacra crossed the Vicus Piscinae Publicae in front of the Amphitheatre. The crowd was heaviest if I bore to my right and went along the southern face of the colossal building. Thinking that a couple of older women might not want to fight that mob, I turned left.
Just past the Amphitheatre I came into a district of insulas, most three to five stories high. Straining to see above the crowd, I thought I spotted a woman’s gray hair above a familiar blue cloak. That must be Plinia. I pushed my way through the crowd, ignoring protests, lewd suggestions, and threats, until I was almost close enough to touch her. Suddenly someone reached out from the narrow, dark street between two buildings and grabbed her arm.
“Hey! Let her go!” I shouted as Plinia was pulled into the alley. “Help! Somebody, help!”
I turned into the alley and saw Plinia being dragged farther into it by a dark-haired man. She was too frail to put up any resistance. “Let her go!” I yelled.
Because the man was holding Plinia so close to his chest, with an arm around her throat, I didn’t want to pull my knife. If I tried to stab him, I could easily injure her. He surprised me when he stopped and threw Plinia to the ground. I hoped she would get up and run, but then I realized that the alley ran into the back of another building. There was no way out that I could see.
The man—and it was Simon—turned to face me. I was expecting him to draw his knife and I was about to reach for mine, but he lunged at me and knocked me up against the wall of one of the buildings. As I slid to the ground I had difficulty drawing a breath.
Simon kicked me in the stomach. “I could kill you, but I need you to take a message to Gaius Pliny. He has my son. Now I have his mother. I’ll be in touch with him soon. Can you tell him that?”
I nodded and Simon kicked me again, causing me to vomit. “Good girl.” He bent down close to my ear. “I’ll bet your master Gaius Pliny says that a lot.”
I fell unconscious.
I was awakened by hands on my body and an awful smell. A hand started moving up between my legs.
“Oh, she’s awake,” an unshaven…thing chortled. At first I wasn’t sure if it was a man or a large rat. Maybe I was dreaming. Since it could speak, I decided it was a man. “This’ll be even more fun.”
Tacitus and I did not stay at the arch much longer. If Josephus knew anything more about the Ark of the Covenant, he wasn’t going to tell me. He urged me again to visit the Temple of the Caesars, near the arch, to see the actual Menorah and other objects depicted on the arch, as well as other booty from Jerusalem, but I was too worried about my mother. If Aurora had caught up with her, and if the men I sent after Aurora had caught up with her, everything must be all right. But those were two big “ifs.”
We parted company when we came to the Amphitheatre. Tacitus and Josephus turned right toward their homes on the Aventine and Palatine hills respectively and my servants and I retraced the route we had followed on our way down here. When we arrived home I walked into a scene of turmoil. Demetrius met me at the door with the news.
“My lord, I’m so sorry to tell you, but your mother has been abducted.”
“What on earth are you talking about?”
“Aurora is in here, my lord. She can tell you herself.”
He led me to a room off the atrium, where I found Aurora lying on a couch with two servant women tending to her.
I dismissed the other two women and knelt down beside the couch. “What happened?”
“Gaius, I’m so sorry.” She sobbed and told me how Simon had taken my mother.
“Are you badly hurt?”
She shook her head. “Just some bruises where he kicked me. He was wearing something like caligae, not regular sandals.”
“Can you walk?”
“I think so. I’m not bleeding.”
I stood up. “Then get up. You have to show me where this happened. I’ve got to find my mother.”
She put a hand on her ribs. “Gaius, I can tell you—”
“I’m sorry to be so insistent when you’ve been hurt. Finding some dark alley with just your description might be impossible. You have to show me the place. Now, get up.” I gave her my hand and she pulled herself off the couch.
I knew Aurora was in a great deal of pain, but she was the only one who could show me exactly where this incident had happened. Even though it would slow us down a bit, I ordered a litter brought to the door for her to ride in. Following her directions, we made our way slowly down the Esquiline, accompanied by Archidamos and two other servants.
“In here,” she finally said, pointing to an opening off to our left, between two insulas. She stayed in the litter while I entered the alley. My servants blocked the entrance.
I walked to the end of the alley and back. It was strewn with barrels and amphoras and garbage. “There’s no other way out,” I said. “Did he step over you as he left?”
“I don’t think so, but I was unconscious part of the time.”
“Surely someone on the street would have noticed him manhandling an older woman. She wouldn’t have gone with him willingly.”
“Noticing doesn’t mean helping, my lord. I called for help when I saw someone grab your mother. No one paid any attention. I doubt many people would try to stop Simon from doing anything. Evil hangs over him like a cloud.”
“All right. If he didn’t come past you to get out of here, there must be some other way out. That’s the only logical conclusion.”
“Let’s look more closely then, my lord.” With a groan she pushed herself out of the litter and walked into the alley. “I was attacked later by a man who smelled like he had crawled out of a sewer.”
“But I don’t see any grates or openings into the sewer,” I said.
“Someone must have covered it up.” We were far enough away from the other servants now that she could be more casual. “Can you move some of these barrels? I think they’re empty.”
I shoved a couple of barrels out of the way but found nothing.
“How about the one back in the corner?”
One barrel in a corner had been partially crushed. I tried to push it to one side, but it was stuck to something.
Aurora examined the barrel and said, “Try lifting up.”
When I pushed up, the barrel moved and brought something solid with it. “It’s nailed to the sewer cover,” I said. The stench rising from the hole verified what I had said. We also heard voices and rustling sounds and saw moving lights, as though people were walking around, carrying torches.
Aurora looked closely at the results of my work. “There’s a handle on the bottom of the cover. Someone could close it behind them.”
I sat on the edge of the hole, with my feet on the top rung of a wobbly ladder. I shuddered to think that Simon forced my mother to climb down that thing, or, more likely, climbed down it himself with her slung over his shoulder. As best I could tell in the dim light filtering into the hole, it was about twice the height of a man.
“Are you going down there?” Aurora asked.
“I think I have to. This is where Simon took my mother.”
“But the sewers are as vast as Rome itself. They lead everywhere. How do you expect to find her?”
She was right, of course. People have driven wagons and sailed boats in Rome’s sewers. Their layout is as complicated as the streets of the city. “I don’t know, but I have to try, don’t I?” I took a step down the ladder. “You’ve heard Martial tell about his exploits in the sewers to rescue his baby daughter.”
“But he knew where she was going to be. He went in and got out quickly. If you go down there and wander around trying to find your mother, you might never come back.”
I couldn’t stop the tears. “But what else can I do? Tell me, what else can I do?”
Aurora put her arms around me. I didn’t care if the servants at the other end of the alley could see or hear us. “Let’s think this through, Gaius. Simon isn’t waiting at the bottom of that ladder. We know that. He went down it, but he had a plan—some place to go.”
That started me thinking. “Simon can’t possibly know his way around the sewers. Lucullus moved his household here less than a month ago.”
“You’re right,” Aurora said. “The man has learned a lot about the city in the time he’s been here, but he’s been above ground.” She was making sense.
“What if he went down here,” I said, “made his way to the next opening and came up there? Or maybe he waited down here until he was sure you were gone, then came back out. Then he could find his way to wherever he’s hiding. And he must have some hiding place, in a deserted building perhaps.”
“So we need to be thinking about where that might be. Instead of trying to follow him, let’s try to get ahead of him.”
Encouraged by Aurora’s suggestion, I was ready to climb back up out of the hole when a hand grabbed my ankle and pulled hard.
Before I could do anything to help him, Gaius disappeared into the sewer. I heard a splash. A dirty, bearded man rose far enough out of the hole to pull the cover down. I tried frantically to open it again, but someone was holding it or had barred it in some way. I could hear splashing and yelling from more than one voice. Gaius was being attacked. I was sure of it. I ran to get our three servants who were blocking the entrance to the alley.
I landed in shit. I could smell it and feel it all over me. Flailing around just made it worse. I tried to get my feet under me, but I kept slipping. Rats were squeaking and scrambling over me. People were running toward me. There was barely enough light from the torches they were carrying for me to get some sense of where I was. I made it to my feet but uncertainly. “He’s a narrow-striper!” someone cried. “Get his money bag!” Then someone landed on top of me from behind, knocked me to my knees, and tried to force my head underwater. I reached over my shoulder, grabbed a fistful of hair and flipped him over my head. Only it wasn’t a “him.”
Getting to my feet again, I blew water and filth from my mouth and nose and drew my sword from under my tunic. I wanted to take a position with my back to the ladder but half a dozen inhabit
ants of this literal Underworld were creeping toward me, threatening to get between me and the ladder. Two had knives; the rest were armed with sticks and clubs.
“Aurora! Help!” I cried. What was taking her so long to lift the grate?
Our minds do funny things at the oddest moments. Here I faced the possibility of dying alone in a sewer, but my mind wasn’t frantically planning how to get out. Instead, I was thinking of how, when we were children, Aurora and I used to thrill at reading the passages in the Odyssey and the Aeneid where the heroes went into the Underworld. They both drew their swords to fight off what Virgil called “bodiless, airy lives flitting about with a hollow semblance of form.” Aeneas wanted to rush at them and hack at the shadows uselessly with his sword. The creatures that I faced looked like such ghostly apparitions, but they had very solid bodies.
They started moving slowly toward me. I took a step toward the ladder and called out, “Who wants to be the first to die?” I hoped my voice wasn’t quavering as much as I felt it was. The threat was enough to stop them for a moment.
The man with the longest stick stepped forward. His weapon had a sharpened point. He could reach me with it before my short sword could do any damage to him. Above my head I could hear Aurora urging my other servants to break through the grate. The thing splintered and dim light filtered into the tunnel.
“Come on, my lord!” Archidamos reached his strong arm down into the hole. My attackers drew back, like monsters from myths who are afraid of the light.
I scrambled up the ladder. “You don’t want to touch me,” I told Archidamos. “Do you have my money pouch?”
“Of course, my lord.”
“Throw it down there.” One man was already on the bottom rung of the ladder. I hesitated to kick at him for fear that he would grab my foot.
“All of it, my lord? There’s nearly—”
“Yes, all of it, damn you!”
When Archidamos was still slow to move, Aurora reached into the top of his tunic and pulled out the money bag. She yanked so hard the strap holding it around his neck broke. She opened the bag and poured the coins down the shaft. “That will distract them,” she said. The man below me on the ladder dropped off.